BRET STEPHENS: POSTSCRIPT ON POLLARD…SEE NOTE PLEASE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323605404578382320551670316.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
I AGREE WITH BRET STEPHENS, AS I HAVE STATED BEFORE…..THE LENGTH AND SEVERITY OF POLLARD’S INCARCERATION DESERVES SCRUTINY AND OPPOSITION….BUT, HE IS NO HERO AND TO NAME ANYTHING IN ISRAEL FOR HIM IS INSULTING AND OUTRAGEOUS…AND TO LINK ANY MORE APPEASEMENT FROM ISRAEL TO HIS RELEASE IS PERVERSE….RSK
A spy who betrayed his country and his people is nobody’s hero.
What is the essence of a diseased politics? When the fringe captures and brands the center, rather than the other way around.
You can think of any number of examples of the phenomenon, from the disarmament obsessives (including the young Barack Obama) who made the Democratic Party unfit to hold the presidency throughout the second half of the Cold War, to the anti-immigration obsessives who are doing likewise to the Republican Party today.
What’s true about American politics writ large goes also for any number of political causes writ small. I was reminded of this on Monday when I was abruptly disinvited from delivering a keynote to a charitable pro-Israel organization for the sin of opposing, in my last column, the release of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.
And that was just the icing on the blizzard of opprobrium—”scurrilous,” “unbelievable,” “arrogant and callous,” “it is anti-Semitic not to free him,” and so on—that piled into my inbox from people whose most fervent political identity is their support for Israel. One writer named Giulio Meotti went so far as to accuse me of committing not one, but two, “blood libels” against Pollard. I last heard from Mr. Meotti a few months ago when he apologized for plagiarizing from an old column of mine. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Two points need making here.
The first is a refresher course on who Pollard was and what he did. According to a recently declassified CIA damage assessment report (which Pollard supporters mistakenly claim vindicates him), he was an emotionally disturbed individual who lied to his superiors about his academic and professional qualifications, “disclosed classified information to the South African [defense] attache without authorization,” and on one occasion as a student “waved a pistol in the air and screamed that everyone was out to get him.” He also once claimed that his wife had been kidnapped by the IRA.
In short, he was a nut.
He was also an eager spy. Pollard “established a pattern of providing more and better intelligence than his handlers expected.” All or nearly all of the information concerned Soviet, Arab and Pakistani military capabilities.
Associated PressA rally for the release of Jonathan Pollard in Jerusalem.
It was intelligence that was meant to help Israel, not harm the United States. But he also handed over “three daily intelligence summaries, prepared by the National Security Agency and Naval Intelligence,” amounting to some 1,500 messages in all. More damagingly, he handed over the NSA’s “Radio Signal Notation” manual, which helped Israel listen in on Soviet-Syrian radio traffic but also cost the U.S. billions of dollars to replace.
“In terms of the sheer quantity of identified intelligence stolen over a limited period,” the CIA concluded, “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known U.S. espionage cases.”
Perhaps that—and not the preposterous suggestion that a self-confessed spy is really the victim of a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy perpetrated at the highest levels of the Reagan administration—has something to do with the severity of Pollard’s sentence.
Nor did Pollard help himself by telling Wolf Blitzer, then a reporter with the Jerusalem Post, that he was a “master spy” and that his plea bargain was a “judicial crucifixion,” thereby expressing something other than the remorse typically expected of those seeking more lenient sentences. One example of chutzpah is the child who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan. So is the spy who boasts of his deeds, denounces his prosecutors and then demands a lighter sentence from the judge.
The second point is the way in which Pollard’s advocates have gone about defending him. Pollard can be defended as a proud hero who gave Israel intelligence vital to its security at a time when U.S. policy was insufficiently friendly. Or he can be defended as a penitent fool who has now paid a heavy price for his criminal delusions of grandeur.
If it’s the former, the best way to vindicate his heroism is to accept the price that must be paid for it. If it’s the latter, the best his defenders could do is acknowledge the damage he and his Israeli handlers did—not only to U.S. intelligence, but to Israel’s reputation as an ally and to the honor of the American-Jewish community as a whole.
That so many of Pollard’s defenders have yet to do so is probably the single greatest impediment to his release. Nor can it help Pollard’s case that he would likely get a hero’s welcome should he ever be released to Israel. A nation that cannot recognize that wantonly committing espionage against its closest ally is an enduring source of shame, not pride, is one that has some serious soul-searching to do.
Israel’s leaders get this: Pleas for Pollard’s release by President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amount to an acknowledgment that he is the one paying the price for the Israeli government’s gross misjudgment.
But the people who really need to get it are the ones writing me infuriated letters and disinviting me from speeches. If they cannot admit that what Pollard did was damaging and despicable, they are lending a patina of credibility to some of the worst anti-Semitic canards. It’s one thing for a rogue agent to betray U.S. secrets; it’s another for a legion of defenders to rise up to justify his espionage.
The case for Israel in the U.S. has always rested on the fact that the values and interests of the two countries are compatible even if they are not identical. But that is true only so long as Israel and its advocates labor to maintain that compatibility. It is harder to think of a more efficient way to undo those labors than to defend the likes of Jonathan Pollard, the man who betrayed both his country and his people.
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