http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/20th-century-war-paradoxes/?print=1 From time to time, I take a break from opinion writing here at Works and Days [1] and turn to history — on this occasion, I am prompted by the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here are a few of the most common questions that I have encountered while teaching […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-russia-policy-submission/ Putin openly acts against U.S. interests; Obama pretends all is well. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton offered a “reset button” to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Among countries vulnerable to and apprehensive of Russia, this was considered an American submission. As a sign of goodwill by the Obama administration and to prove an openness […]
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
“How Will I Explain This On The Steps Of The Mosque At Lakemba?”: Australian Foreign Minister Carr’s Stance On Israel Condemned
Today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph (12 December, Aussie time) carries an exclusive column by the prominent Labor federal politician Michael Danby, chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence.
Danby, at one stage of his career the only Jew in federal Parliament, is (like Foreign Minister Bob Carr, once considered friendly towards Israel) a leading figure on the Right of his party (the ALP), and has been a pro-Israel advocate since his student days.
In his column he condemns what he sees as Carr’s manipulative betrayal of Israel, which, he claims involved Carr ringing around keyparty figures to ensure that pro-Israel Prime Minister Julia Gillard (pictured, with Bibi Netanyahu) was undermined.
Writes Danby, inter alia:
“As NSW premier he [Carr, in 2003] awarded the Sydney Peace Prize to Palestinian ideologue Hanan Ashrawi. As the only major figure in the Australian Jewish community to defend his actions, I used the Voltaire argument, namely his right to say things with which others disagreed….
Parliament last month saw a switch in Australia’s stance at the UN creation of a Palestinian state after Julia Gillard’s pro-Israel position was challenged and then overturned by Carr and others….
Some caucus members worry about every Palestinian – who is, by aid dollars per capita, the most highly subsidised minority in the world, including $350 million of Australian taxpayer funds.
By contrast, poor gentle Tibet gets little sympathy. More than 80 Tibetans have burned themselves to death in the past 18 months as a result of Chinese oppression.
Tibetans launch terrorist attacks on no one. They acquire no Iranian missiles to attack Chinese cities; they strap on no suicide vests to blow up no children on school buses.
Yet the Tibetans can’t get a meeting with our Foreign Minister and they don’t get a dollar from the UN.
We avert our eyes when a real power like China crushes under its boot an ancient people like the Tibetans. Yet our Foreign Minister asks of the Palestinian vote at the UN: “How will I explain this on the steps of the mosque at Lakemba?”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2236/rejection_and_terror_same_old_palestinian_choices
Last weekend, as Jews around the world began celebrating the festival of Chanukah (the triumph of light over darkness), in Gaza there was a different kind of ‘celebration’, marking the 25th anniversary of the start of the first Palestinian intifada.
The intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel, in which 27 Israelis were killed and an estimated 3,000 were injured. It was choreographed from start to finish by the PLO, not just the precursor to today’s Palestinian Authority, but still a major component of it.
Hamas’s ‘celebrations’ were also timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the founding of the terrorist group.
Now, what, you may ask, were they celebrating?
Equal rights for minorities in Gaza, including women, Christians, and homosexuals?
What about freedom of speech, rule of law, and democracy?
Or, God forbid, maybe their hopes and aspirations for peace in the Middle East and a Two State Solution: Israel and Palestine living side-by-side in safety and security?
Regrettably not. Leopards don’t change their spots. After 25 years, all Hamas has to show for is death, murder, terror, and hate.
No sooner had Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal passed through the Egyptian border, in his first ever trip to Gaza, than he told the world, and Israel, exactly what he hoped to celebrate:
“Today is Gaza. Tomorrow will be Ramallah and after that Jerusalem then Haifa and Jaffa.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2233/truths_and_myths_in_the_new_palestine_reality So the dust is beginning to settle on the UN vote to give a non-existent state the status of a state (if you follow me). Maybe this is a good time to work out what is myth and what is reality in the new “peace paradigm” that the UN has created. Let’s make no […]
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-israeli-president-shimon-peres-on-peace-a-871911-druck.html
“I see it as a ‘world spring’ rather than an Arab spring,” muses the Israeli President. “And you can’t come to a world spring dressed for winter.” (Interview by Hans Hoyng & Juliane von Mittelstaedt)
‘We Have to Open Negotiations Right Away’
The United Nations has recognized a Palestinian state and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to prefer confrontation over negotiation. But in an interview with SPIEGEL, Israeli President Shimon Peres says that there is no alternative to re-starting peace talks, adding that it is time to forget the past.
SPIEGEL: In a recent vote, the United Nations essentially recognized a state of Palestine by granting it “non-member observer status.” Are you disappointed by that decision?
Peres: You can criticize the UN resolution, but it doesn’t matter. I learned a long time ago that there is one thing in life you cannot change, and that is the past. What happened, happened.
SPIEGEL: Will the UN decision make peace negotiations with the Palestinians more difficult?
Peres: I don’t know if more difficult, but more necessary. Now the major issue will be the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the two parties will try to hunt each other. Is that a prospect for the future? That’s what we’ve done the whole time: They used to blame us, and we used to blame them. But we have to forget the past.
SPIEGEL: Yet when making claims to the Holy Land, both sides cite thousands of years of history.
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5545/features/the-first-war-of-national-liberation-2/
The first Book of Maccabees describes the military victory that became part of the story of Hanukkah. But the book did not enter the Jewish scriptural canon, and the rabbinic Hanukkah focuses not on the Maccabees’ military achievement but on the eight-day miracle of the oil. There are differing theories of why the narrative of the holiday changed so dramatically. One view calls attention to the surprisingly contemporary character of the Maccabees’ revolt. Their uprising—in its underlying aim, its particular triggering event, its strategic and tactical methods, and its political complications—can lay claim to being the first war of national liberation. Reprinted here, from Jewish Ideas Daily, is Diana Muir Appelbaum’s account of why the Book of Maccabees is so modern and so dangerous. —The Editors
This is the 2,179th anniversary of the world’s first war of national liberation. There have been many since. To a surprising extent, such wars have followed the pattern first established by the Maccabees. They, like later heads of independence movements, were leaders of a people conquered and occupied by a great empire. They fought to claim the right of national self-determination.
Resentment of foreign rule may simmer for a long time, but war is often remembered as beginning in a dramatic incident. In Switzerland, this memory belongs to William Tell. He was the national hero who in 1307 refused to bow to a hat belonging to the Hapsburg governor, which was set on a tall pole in the center of Altdorf for the sole purpose of forcing Swiss freemen to genuflect to it. Tell’s defiance sparked the fight for Swiss independence.
The story about Tell may be true, but it was not recorded until the 1560s. The Jewish “William Tell” moment occurred in the Year 167 B.C.E., when a priest named Matityahu (Mattathias) refused an order to make a sacrifice to a Greek god. Matityahu’s story is better documented than Tell’s, since it comes from the Book of First Maccabees (not the later II, III, and IV Maccabees), a text actually written in the Maccabean period.
At the time, the wealthy and powerful Jewish residents of Jerusalem had made a “covenant with the Gentiles”: They followed Hellenistic ways, had their circumcisions surgically effaced, and built a Greek gymnasium for training in Hellenistic sports, literature, ethics, and philosophy. But the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes upset the equilibrium, ordering that Jewish texts be destroyed and Jews forced to eat pork and break the Sabbath.
Matityahu, with his sons, fled Jerusalem for his ancestral village of Modi’in. There, a Seleucid officer ordered him to make a public sacrifice to Zeus. Matityahu refused. “I and my sons and our kinsmen,” he said, “shall follow the covenant of our fathers.”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/truth-human-nature-and-the-american-way
This past November 27, 2012, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) held its annual forum, titled “The Price of Greatness: The Next Four Years of U.S. Foreign Policy”, at the Newseum’s Knight Conference Center in Washington, DC. Comments during forum panels there by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) once again evoked questions concerning a proper understanding between America’s ideals of liberty and intervention abroad in their name. Such longstanding issues are no less important today in light of a United States that has led several military intervention coalitions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, Libya in the past decade. These exercises in regime change/nation-building sought to counter multiple, often interrelated, threats in majority-Muslim countries with the exportation of, if not mature free societies, then at least indigenous regimes at peace with their local populations and the world. Current events in Syria and Iran continue to hold forth the distinct prospect of the United States and its allies becoming involved in additional interventions of varying natures in Dar al-Islam in the years to come. Questions concerning the proper use of power to promote peace and prosperity in America and abroad already present at the United States founding era have not lost any relevance in the ensuing decades.
FPI’s mission statement on its website advocates an “active U.S. foreign policy committed to robust support for democratic allies, human rights,” a “strong American military”, and “strengthening America’s global economic competitiveness.” Less favorably, the left-wing Sourcewatch and Right Web (the latter produced by the Institute for Policy Studies or IPS) websites describe FPI along with its 2009 founder William Kristol with the dreaded “neoconservative” moniker. As Right Web with its mission of “Tracking militarists’ efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy” editorializes, neoconservatives like Kristol support an “aggressive U.S. security posture” entailing American intervention in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. As the American Conservative criticizes from quarters on the political right with a well-known analogy, FPI sees the United States as the proverbial “world’s policeman.”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/historys-dark-chapter-retold The year is 1946. The Second World War is over and much of Europe is a wasteland. Millions of displaced persons roam the ravaged landscape in the wake of the German Nazi devastation. Millions more are dead but none of the citizens of Europe have suffered disproportionally more than its Jewish remnant. At the […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/335377 Who is worse: President Mohamed Morsi, the elected Islamist seeking to apply Islamic law in Egypt, or President Hosni Mubarak, the former dictator ousted for trying to start a dynasty? More broadly, will a liberal, democratic order more likely emerge under Islamist ideologues who prevail through the ballot box or from greedy dictators with […]
