RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Green and Pleasant Land

Long-awaited winter rains, plus my recent trip to the Arava in southern Israel are the inspiration for this week’s blog. The Arava region in Israel’s Negev “desert” now produces 60% of Israel’s exports of food crops, right alongside massive fields of solar panels. It is a microcosm of Israel’s advanced agricultural technologies that combine with its cleantech innovations to help generate a green and sustainable planet.

My journey south centered around Kibbutz Ketura, just 50km north of Eilat, which hosts the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. It also contains a 5MegaWatt solar field, with self-cleaning robots, built by Arava Power, which is now constructing a 40MW field just across the road. It has a factory growing special algae that makes Ketura the world’s leading source of the natural anti-oxidant astaxanthin.

Two innovative joint research projects have just been approved, involving scientists at MIT and at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. You can probably guess the goals of “Self-Sustained Agriculture Based on Marginal Water”, but you may have more trouble with “Identification of Epigenetic Quantitative Trait Loci Associated with Tomato Seed Germination”! Before we leave the Negev, Israel’s Brenmiller Energy has just announced that it will establish a 10MW solar power station in Dimona, capable of generating electricity from solar energy for an average of 20 hours a day.

Anti-Semitism will always be with us, but it ebbs and flows. And there are Jews who help it along.

In a previous column I promised to come up with the exact date when journalism went to war against Israel. It’s important to get this straight in order to find out what went wrong – what went wrong so far as the epidemic of anti-Semitism now sweeping the world and journalism’s role for this outbreak.

If we could stamp a date to it, or a name, maybe we can figure out where we failed. Was it something we did?

Or something they did over which we had no control?

The draft war resolution President Obama sent to congress last week begins with the statement describing our enemy as “…the terrorist organization that has referred to itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and various other names…”

That characterization implies that the Islamic State has somehow mislabeled itself. And we know which part the president questions: he doesn’t believe the Islamic State is Islamic at all.

If you read Obama’s “National Security Strategy,” released earlier this month, the only statement about Islam you will find is the denial that Islam has any relationship to what used to be called the “Global War on Terror.” The new “strategy” — to label it as such is to deny the meaning of the word – says only that “We reject the lie that America and its allies are at war with Islam.”

That’s true as far as it goes. But who is at war with us?

The Islamist attacks in Copenhagen on Saturday were all but expected. The Danish police report claiming the 22 years old Danish born Muslim, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, was “a Lone Wolf.”

He may have been the only shooter, but he was not alone. And he was not a wolf, nor was he “self radicalized.” He was a sheep inspired by repeated Islamist propaganda and incitement for jihad, targeting those who “offend” their prophet Mohammad, and the Jews.

“Cursing or mocking the Prophet is an act of apostasy, as all scholars concur, whether it is done seriously or in jest. Anyone who does this, Muslim or infidel, must be killed,
even if he repents” [Emphasis added],” instructed Saudi Imam Issa Assiri in his televised sermon that was posted on his Facebook page (translated by MEMRI) in the aftermath of the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket.

Concern over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and the danger it poses to the survival of the nation should be common to all shades of political opinion in Israel.

Iran has exploited… turmoil to pursue positions of power within other countries beyond the control of national authorities, such as in Lebanon and Iraq, and while developing a nuclear program of potentially global consequence… Nuclear talks with Iran began as an international effort, buttressed by six UN resolutions, to deny Iran the capability to develop a military nuclear option. They are now an essentially bilateral negotiation over the scope of that capability… The impact of this approach will be to move from preventing proliferation to managing it
– Henry Kissinger, before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, January 29, 2015

Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy
– Henry Kissinger

These citations from the doyen of American strategic diplomacy – one from a statement delivered last month, the other, a remark made decades ago – capture the essence of the brouhaha that has erupted over the invitation extended to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress on March 3.

The first illustrates the substantive disagreement over the emerging accord with Tehran and its nuclear program; the other exposes the underlying reason for the political disagreement in Israel over the invitation – and which, in turn, has sparked parallel political disagreement in the US.

Not a Netanyahu apologist

Regular readers of this column will know that I am not an uncritical Netanyahu apologist. I have on numerous occasions condemned his policy decisions when I have thought them flawed and/or unfounded. On the other hand, I have defended him vigorously against ad hominem attacks by political opponents or by the pathologically antagonistic mainstream media.

However, on the issue of his acceptance of Boehner’s invitation to present Israel’s perception of the Iranian nuclear issue to the representatives of the American people, there should be no room for equivocation.

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

We’re well into the new century, moving swiftly through the second decade of the new millennium, at ease in an era of science, modern medicine and wondrous electronics that our grandparents could not have imagined. (Even our parents don’t understand most of it.)

So why does 2015 smell like Munich in 1938, reeking of denial, blindness, cant and cowardice in the year that would introduce monstrous tyranny and barbarism, an assault on the very idea of civilization? Comparisons may be odious but only the weak and foolish look and do not see.

A gunman invades the sanctity of a synagogue in Copenhagen, where Jews at worship imagined they were safe, and kills the man guarding the door. This followed by a day an attempted massacre at a seminar on free speech in another part of Copenhagen, where a gunman shouting the familiar Muslim cry of worship — “Allahhu Akbar,” or “God is great” — shot and killed one of the participants.

‘Devastated’ by Slain Jew, yet Denmark Huge Funder of Anti-Israel Activity NGO-Monitor: “Danish government is among the leaders in funding for anti-Israel NGO demonization in Europe, irresponsibly providing large sums via a number of mechanisms.”
By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

The prime minister of Denmark laid flowers on Sunday, Feb. 15, at the site where the day before a Jewish man was shot in the head and killed while volunteering as a security guard outside of a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Was the murder of Dan Uzan, the son of an Israeli father, an act in which the Danish government was indirectly complicit?

When Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt laid the wreath outside of the synagogue, she offered her condolences to the slain man’s family and to the whole Jewish community. She said she and her entire country were devastated by Uzan’s murder, and by all that happened in Copenhagen on Feb. 14.

“A man has lost his life in a service of that synagogue and we are devastated,” Thorning-Schmidt said, speaking to Jewish Danes.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

In the midst of recent horrific acts of terror, from burning the Jordanian pilot to storming the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Danish café holding a free speech conference and the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, many opinion leaders scratch their heads over President Obama and his administration’s refusal to couple the words “Islam” with “terrorism.” The result is the label “violent extremism,” awkwardly redundant in large part because what makes its referents “extreme” is precisely their use of violence. Many exasperatingly surmise the administration must be naïve, even delusional, and fails to understand the threat we face. Most then correctly warn that if we cannot accurately name the threat, we stand little chance of effectively dealing with it.

Two Narratives

This is not, however, a failure to understand the nature of Islam and its connection with modern day terror at all. Rather, it is the result of perhaps the most defining characteristic of Obama’s presidency: savvy rhetoric that, quite deliberately, disguises his actions and policies. From “you can keep your doctor” to “this will be the most transparent administration in history,” the President is facile juggling two vastly different narratives; one to trap and control public attention while the other grounds his policies. And as with the IRS targeting of conservatives, the Benghazi assassinations, Obamacare and so on, when the actions invariably so conflict with the rhetoric, we struggle to explain the dissonance in ways we can most accept. In the case of Obama’s dealings with Islam and, in particular our Islamic enemies, however, finding an acceptable explanation is exceptionally frustrating because we are generally unfamiliar with Islam. Consequently, we indulge in (and a compliant media even clings to) explanations that Obama is naïve, incompetent, or psychologically stressed because they are more comforting than recognizing the alternative.

On a sunny Saturday in September 2009, with Wisconsin in the throes of tea party fervor, conservative starlet Michelle Malkin fired up a crowd of thousands at a lakefront park in Milwaukee with rhetoric about White House czars and union thugs and the “culture of dependency that they have rammed down our throats.”

Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, casually attired in a red University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, stepped to the podium to amplify the message. “We’re going to take back our government,” he shouted, jabbing the air with a finger. The attendees whooped and clapped. “We’ve done it here, we can do it in Wisconsin and, by God, we’re going to do it all across America.”

In a way, the event was Scott Walker’s graduation to the political major leagues. The audience had been delivered up by Americans for Prosperity, a tea party organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire energy executives whose fortune helps shape Republican politics. With Americans for Prosperity, the brothers had harnessed the tea party’s energy in service of their own policy goals, including deregulation and lower taxes. And in Walker, they’d found the perfect instrument to help carry them out. The rally was one of the first times they’d joined forces.