RUTHFULLY YOURS

After U.S. Central Command called on us to help transport from Iraq enough yellowcake uranium to make several atomic bombs stored at Saddam’s nuclear weapons complex, I realized why neither the Pentagon nor the White House advertised the presence of this WMD precursor: safety and security.

Before the U.S. military moved in to secure the facility after the 2003 invasion, looters had been there first. Even though the universally recognized yellow-and-black radioactivity warnings were posted on the bunkers, locals had ripped open the storage areas and stolen casks of yellowcake with many sickened as a result. More importantly, we did not want the insurgents alerted to the exposed stockpile as they might attack the facility. This is also why the George W. Bush administration did not crow about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq, as recently reported by the New York Times. That is a serious quantity of WMD, by any standard. Interestingly, the Bush team could have diluted near-uniform shock at the failure to find WMD by highlighting these discoveries instead of allowing the narrative we all know to solidify: “no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found except a few dozen old, mustard-gas artillery shells left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.” Yet President Bush and his advisors chose to protect the troops and the mission rather than score political points back on the war’s second front, the American body politic. (None of this, however, mitigates any unpreparedness by the Pentagon to treat service members exposed to chemical weapons.)

Before my company arrived to provide guards and to build and operate a base camp for U.S. Department of Energy scientists dissecting Saddam’s nuclear weapons facility, the American Army had occupied the site with almost a company of infantry. This was quite a bit of combat power tethered to a non-populated, static location when needed to actively defend the people against the elusive al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists and Iranian-allied militias rampant until early 2008 when the American Surge forces and the Sunni Arab “Awakening” had turned the tide delivering our victory in the Iraq War. The limited number of combat troops available did not permit fixing them at every site where WMD were found or might be found. Hence the requirement to not advertise that Saddam had left thousands of chemical weapons lying around, potentially under any mound in mostly flat Iraq. That would have set off a dangerous treasure hunt—and if found, a tremendous threat to American troops and everyone in Iraq especially if weaponized nerve gas had ended up with al-Qaeda.

Originally published by the Harvard Crimson.

I never imagined that a day would come when some of the world’s leading corporations would fund calls for Israel’s destruction, let alone at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But that is exactly what happened last week at Harvard.

My invitation to “Harvard Arab Weekend” promised to provide a “mosaic of perspectives and insights on the most pressing issues in the Arab world.” Many of the panels appeared worthy of the conference’s corporate support from McKinsey & Co, The Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bank Audi, Strategy&, and the energy giant Shell. And yet featured prominently on the conference agenda was a panel devoted to the destruction of Israel: “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement: Accomplishments, Tactics and Lessons.”

The panel’s moderator, Ahmed Alkhateeb, began by noting that a primary goal of the BDS movement is “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties” in what is today Israel. As President Barack Obama pointed out in 2008, this goal stands in opposition to a “two state solution” and “would extinguish Israel as a Jewish State.” And in an op-ed published in Al Akhbar newspaper, Cal State professor As’ad AbuKhalil, an outspoken advocate of the BDS movement, affirmed that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.” This is the “unambiguous goal…[and] there should not be an equivocation on the subject.”

He’s right. While Jews are the majority in the democratic state of Israel today, the BDS movement imagines and seeks a state in which Jews would ultimately become the minority, implying the end of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

Two Palestinian thugs, armed with cleavers, knives and a gun, invaded an orthodox synagogue in West Jerusalem early Tuesday during morning prayers, and proceeded to murder four Jewish worshippers in cold blood. At least a dozen others were wounded. Three of the murder victims were American citizens. The fourth was a British citizen. Three of the victims were also rabbis. Israeli police, arriving at the scene of the horrific massacre and exchanging gunfire with the Palestinians as they tried to escape, shot the murderers to death. But the horrible images of the slain and wounded worshippers with blood everywhere, drenching holy books, prayer shawls and walls of the synagogue, will live on for a very long time.

“To see Jews wearing tefillin and wrapped in the tallit lying in pools of blood, I wondered if I was imagining scenes from the Holocaust,” said Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the veteran leader of a religious emergency-response team as quoted by the New York Times. “It was a massacre of Jews at prayer.”

At least ten Jews have now been run over by cars and killed, or have been stabbed to death by Palestinians during the last month. Call this latest spate of violence the “Car Intifada,” as some Palestinian social media refer to it with a song by that name, or the “Knife Intifada,” as other Palestinians have coined it. Either way, Palestinian leaders have Jewish blood on their hands after exhorting their followers to commit such violent acts. The inciters to murder are as guilty as the murderers themselves.

Predictably, Hamas praised the cowardly synagogue attack as a “heroic” act. Hamas’s leadership claimed that the brutal murders were justified as legitimate responses to Israeli actions. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time,” a spokesman for Hamas declared. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera International to expect “more revolution in Jerusalem, and more uprising.”

In a 2009 paper, “Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program,” Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber argued that there were too many Medicare Part D plans for seniors to choose from, which led them to make bad decisions when enrolling in a plan.

In the paper, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber wrote with Jason T. Abaluck that the privatization of the public Medicare program had resulted in dozens of private insurers offering a wide variety of insurance products for seniors to choose from. The result of so many choices, Gruber wrote, is that seniors are not making decisions that are in their best interest. ”First, elders place much more weight on plan premiums than they do on the expected out of pocket costs that they will incur under the plan. Second, they substantially under-value variance reducing aspects of alternative plans. Finally, consumers appear to value plan financial characteristics far beyond any impacts on their own financial expenses or risk.”

The paper noted that while standard economic theory would suggest that expanded choice is a beneficial plan feature, “There are reasons to believe that the standard model is insufficient, particularly for a population of elders. There is growing interest in behavioral economics in models where agents are better off with a more restricted choice set.”

One of the reasons that choices should be restricted for seniors is their inability to understand the choices available to them. According to Gruber, “These issues may be paramount within the context of the elderly, given that the potential for cognitive failures rises at older ages.” He continued, “There is substantial scope for increases in utility if consumers made better choices, and some of these gains could be realized by restricting to the three lowest cost plans.”

Gruber admits that his models did not distinguish between the case of rational consumers choosing plans they trust and consumers making poor choices due to a lack of cognitive ability. “In either case,” he concluded, “our estimates imply that consumers would be better off if there were less scope for choosing the wrong plan.”

At 7:01 on Tuesday morning two young Palestinian men, cousins from East Jerusalem, entered a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of West Jerusalem where about a dozen people were praying. The two were carrying a gun, a meat cleaver, and an ax.

By seven “Allahu Akbar!”-filled minutes later, when a policeman shot and killed the two, four of the worshippers were dead and six other people, including two other policemen, were wounded.

Two of the four dead were rabbis. Three, immigrants from the U.S., were dual U.S.-Israeli citizens (prompting the FBI to say it would investigate [2]) and one was a dual British-Israeli citizen. The dead included Rabbi Moshe Twersky, son of a renowned Boston-based rabbi and grandson of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik [3], a major Jewish thinker of the twentieth century.

Jerusalem police said the attackers were probably—as in other recent cases—lone wolves and not members of a terror organization.

The trigger for the attack was probably the death of a Palestinian bus driver who was found hanging in his bus on Sunday night, for which Palestinians blamed Israel. An autopsy report said it was suicide [4]—but to no avail, as the man’s death sparked yet another round of riots in Jerusalem on Monday.

Our lame duck reactionary president dares not mention the I-word.

What to say about the latest round of Islamo-carnage in Jerusalem that hasn’t been said thousands of times before? Golda Meir [1] made it all clear in her famous 1957 speech at the National Press Club in DC: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

In other words, basically never. The hate culture of the Palestinians — and almost all Arabs — is so deeply imbued it’s hard to imagine it ever changing. After this recent incident, they danced in the street with hatchets and gave each other candy.

Lots of people have tried to make peace with them. The supposed war-monger Ariel Sharon uprooted his own people and gave the Palestinians Gaza. We all know what happened. Then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians the peace deal of the century. They walked away.

The reason is obvious. The Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution and never have. And not just Hamas with their infamous charter urging the death of all Jews, even Jewish trees (whatever that means) — all of them. Well, not absolutely all. There must be one or two somewhere who really want to share the land with the Jews. I just don’t know who they are. Nobody does. Certainly not Abu Mazen, who started his career writing a Holocaust-denying thesis in Moscow, or Saeb Erekat, who by now must have a Swiss bank account to rival George Soros.

Besides the failure, since 1948, to even recognize the existence of a Jewish state on any territory, one of the more revealing aspects of the putative peace negotiations is that the Palestinians [sic] have always refused to have a single Jew living on their land once they have a state, while there are some million and a half Jews already living in Israel. Palestine must be judenrein — Hitler’s dream realized.

Of course, we get not a peep from the Europeans about this. Instead, according to Haaretz [2], we get new secret plans from the EU to boycott those horrible settlements that allegedly are the root of all this evil. Only the Europeans, Peter Beinart, the fuddy-duddies at J-Street and some Brandeis professors could believe something so absurd. Maybe the latter American group can be added to the old black comic joke, more apropos than ever: “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

“Islamic radicals [are] hiding behind the scenes, influencing the minds of young people. … Someone is persuading them, brainwashing them.” — Ahmed Muthana, father of the jihadist Muthana brothers.

Mehdi Hassan is the fourth British man from the coastal city of Portsmouth to be killed while fighting for ISIS in Syria. Hassan was just 19 when he left with four friends for Syria in October 2013. They named themselves the “Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys.” Four of the five have been killed.

Much of the media has, over the last few years, attempted to explain why British Muslims are being radicalized, and why some wish to fight for a terror group known and feared for its brutality.

Some commentators blame the darker corners of the internet; some point to the supposed glamour and glory of war, and others attribute part of the blame to “government policy” and the “persecution” felt by British Muslims living in a country allegedly full of “anti-Islamic feeling.”

Those concerned with the practical workings of radicalization, however, look to the initial involvement of Western recruits to ISIS with extremist preachers and organizations. Even while crediting the allure of the internet, it seems improbable that anyone would join a cult or extremist group without some encouragement or introduction.

The Palestinian Authority’s Incitement Campaign has reached new heights in recent weeks · Antisemitic caricatures, calls to commit terrorist attacks, blood libels and financial support for murderers and imprisoned terrorists are just some of the means Abu Mazen uses to spur his people to murder Jews · A wake-up call to those who see him as a partner for peace.

The wave of terror we’ve seen in recent weeks is no coincidence. For months, the Palestinian authority and the Fatah movement have been conducting an increasingly shrill incitement campaign which includes direct incitement to commit terror attacks, blood libels, anti-semitic caricatures and clips, spreading lies about Israeli desecration of Islamic holy places and more.

One example of many is a caricature published on the official Fatah facebook page – a “moderate movement”, mind you – which shows a car painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag chasing after Jews who flee in fear of them. Indeed, the facebook page of Abu Mazen’s Fatah movement is a central part of the incitement campaign. A few days ago, the movement published a caricature featuring the Arabic word for “run over” on a road, with the Dome of the Rock in the background. Another facebook post called for committing terrorist attacks by car: “Run over, run over, dear Palestinian, the foreign settler.”
הסתה מתונה מטעם תנועת פתח”. צילום באדיבות ארגון מבט לתקשורת הפלסטינית

“Moderate” incitement to murder by the Fatah. Courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch

A few days ago, the Palestinian paper al-Hayat al-Jadida, a paper belonging to the Palestinian Authority and whose employees are paid by it, published a caricature encouraging stone throwing. In the picture one sees an adult man with a kaffiyeh sitting on the steps with his son, with a police checkpoint and the Dome of the Rock in the background, and the headline reads “purification before prayer is done with stones.”

This is just a small sampling of incitement images from the past few days. To this we can add interviews and declarations of senior PA officials. Abu Mazen’s advisor, Sultan Abu El-Einan, wrote the following of the terrorist Muataz Hijazi after the attempted assassination of Yehuda Glick: “I have not managed to meet your mother to kiss her hand and her forehead for giving her to draw courage and bravery from her breast, and thus turned you into a revolutionary who shortened our path to freedom.”

It’s not clear when (or whether) the Obama White House will conclude a final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. The extended deadline for the interim deal known as the Joint Plan of Action is set to expire November 24. And the president very much wants a deal that would cement his foreign policy legacy. On the other hand, there are still gaps on key issues, like how many centrifuges Iran gets to keep.
How long till Iran’s missiles deliver nukes?

How long till Iran’s missiles deliver nukes?

But here’s the heart of the matter: The White House has caved on so much already that whether or not a final agreement is reached at the end of the month, American interests have already been damaged by the administration’s pliant dealings with a state sponsor of terror. Its record on Iran—not only during nuclear negotiations, but also in its larger regional policy—is nothing but a chronicle of concessions to the Islamic Republic.

It’s instructive to recall that very early in his presidency Obama promised that the military option was still on the table, if all else failed to stop the Iranians from building a bomb. The concern, as White House officials warned back then, was that strikes—American or Israeli—on Iranian nuclear facilities might cause Tehran to retaliate against American -targets in the region, especially U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that the Iranian regime was already responsible for thousands of American deaths, and tens of thousands of wounded, in those two theaters. What’s telling is that the White House saw the U.S. military not as the guardian of American interests, the best friend of American allies, and the dread enemy of American adversaries, but as potential hostages.

In other words, Obama was keen to forfeit his advantages from the outset of his dealings with Iran. In due course, he would trade away American leverage and get nothing in return.
Last year in Geneva the administration agreed to ease sanctions, which, with the credible threat of military force already eroded, was the most powerful instrument the White House had left at its disposal. Prior to the de-escalation of new sanctions and the provision of sanctions relief as part of the Joint Plan of Action, explains Mark -Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “the Iranian economy was on its back. Inflation was officially at 40 percent, and unofficially above 80 percent, and [there was] a severe recession. The JPOA triggered a change in expectations and psychology.” The Iranian economy “was helped to its knees,” says Dubowitz. “A final deal will stand it up again.”

What did the Obama administration get in exchange for rescuing the Iranian economy and thereby saving the clerical regime from domestic turmoil that might have toppled it? Nothing.

Instead, the interim deal acknowledged Iran’s right to enrich uranium. It ignored Iran’s ballistic missile program (the most obvious delivery mechanism for a bomb), despite a U.N. Security Council resolution (1929) as well as several pieces of congressional legislation requiring Iran to cease such -activities. It allowed Iran to continue building its heavy-water plutonium facility at Arak. The deal sought to limit Iran to research and development work on advanced centrifuges, but Tehran exploited that allowance and reportedly built up to 5,000 advanced centrifuges in the last year.

As a Peshmerga fighter, she had an advantage: The enemy fears being killed by a woman.

If you get to know someone in a war, they might well die much sooner than you’d prefer. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve buried many people over the years. True, it’s not really me who buries them. More likely, I am sipping a beer in Cairo or Budapest when I get the news.

My latest such loss was Rengin Yusuf. She was, like me, in her 30s. She was a mother. I met her among other Kurds this summer in a military training camp in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, where she served in a women’s regiment in the fight against the radical Islamists of ISIS. I interviewed her and her fellow officers over tea and then took their pictures. They asked me not to call them “women Peshmergas” because, they said, there is no such thing. A Peshmerga is a Peshmerga, or, in Kurdish, “someone who confronts death.”

The regiment’s youngest woman, Rengin Yusuf was strikingly attractive, with long black hair and a furtive smile. Our conversation didn’t extend beyond what was expected of us. I was the foreign correspondent; she, the Peshmerga. She and the others had been ordered to speak to me to demonstrate that the Kurdish “army” is free of sexism.

As I write these lines, it has been a month since Rengin Yusuf died. The Kurdish PUK Party representative who had been my host notified me via Facebook . “Do you remember this woman?” he asked. “You spoke to her.” “I remember,” I replied. “They killed her,” he wrote, and then asked, “How are you?” I filled him in on how things are back in Europe, and then I paid some bills.