Turning on the “Jewish State.” By Ari Shavit.

Turning on the “Jewish state.” By Ari Shavit. Haaretz, March 20, 2014.

Shavit:

There’ll be no peace if the Palestinians don’t contribute their share; but they won’t contribute their share unless people who want peace insist they contribute it.

 

In Washington, New York and even Tel Aviv, an overall offensive is being waged on the Jewish people’s national state. American and Israeli peace seekers are furiously attacking the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

 

Suddenly not only the settlements are a war crime, but also the Jewish people’s demand to recognize its right to self-definition. Suddenly Zionism’s fundamental idea, which was recognized in the Balfour Declaration, the UN’s partition resolution and the Israeli Declaration of Independence, is not legitimate.

 

The thought that alongside the Palestinian (non-democratic) nation-state there will be a (democratic) Jewish nation-state makes many good people fly off the handle. People who are usually committed to equality are not ready to grant the Jews what they firmly demand for the Palestinians. People who want peace are rejecting out of hand the threshold demand of peace – real mutual recognition.

 

More than enough has been said about the essence of the matter. It’s a conflict of mutual blindness. We didn’t recognize the existence of a Palestinian people entitled to its own sovereign state and the Palestinians didn’t recognize the existence of a Jewish people entitled to its own sovereign state. It’s clear, therefore, that the end of the conflict must entail an end to the blindness. It must involve each side’s recognition of the other, whose existence and rights it has ignored for the past 100 years or so.

 

Israel has already opened its eyes. In 1993 it admitted that there is a Palestinian people; in 2000 Israel agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and in 2009 the right’s leader embraced this double recognition. So now it’s the Palestinians’ turn to open their eyes. When Israel accepts the principle of dividing the land on the basis of the 1967 borders, they will have to declare that there is a Jewish people with legitimate rights to the land, which is entitled to define itself as a Jewish democratic state (as long as it respects all its citizens’ rights and preserves full religious freedom). Simple, so simple. Elementary.

 

Yet, at the moment of truth, the simple suddenly becomes complicated. The elementary is seen as surreal, wacky. Even though Yasser Arafat already recognized the Jewish state and even though John Kerry’s peace plan was based from the start on recognizing the Jewish state, the term has suddenly become a four-letter word.

 

The most basic demand directed at the Palestinians is suddenly seen as a whim. Why? Because when Mahmoud Abbas says no, many in the international community and the Israeli left cave in. They lack the courage required to stand up to the Palestinians and tell them “this far.” Even when the Palestinian stance is clearly immoral, they feel an obligation to toe the line.

 

Prof. Alexander Yakobson is an historian who was formerly active in a peace party. When he left his party he told me its platform was excellent. The problem, he said, was that beneath the platform there was a clause written in invisible ink, saying that all the previous principles are subject to the Palestinians not opposing them. So the moment the Palestinians veto anything, the Zionist left’s platform collapses and loses its validity.

 

The invisible ink is the in-depth problem of the international and Israeli peace camp. Paradoxically, the invisible ink is currently one of the greatest obstacles to peace. There will be no peace if the Palestinians don’t contribute their share to it. But the Palestinians won’t contribute their share if people who want peace in Israel and the world don’t insist they contribute it.

 

So it’s time that those who really want to end the occupation and divide the land stand up, face Abbas and demand that he too crosses the Rubicon. If he fails to do so, the landslide will be immensely dangerous. Abbas is in danger of burying not the Jewish state, but the two-state solution.

Are We Alone in the Universe? By Charles Krauthammer.

Are We Alone in the Universe? By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, December 30, 2011. Also here.

Things That Matter, excerpt from the Introduction. By Charles Krauthammer. New York: Random House, 2013. Also here.


Krauthammer [Are We Alone]:

Huge excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than 1,000 light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the so-called “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

 

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is likely gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.

 

And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

 

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

 

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

 

How many of them should there be? Modern satellite data suggest the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

 

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, near instantly so.

 

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very same day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that just created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird-flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

 

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror, but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are just the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.

 

And forget the psychopaths: Why, just 17 years after Homo sapiens discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, the United States and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

 

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

 

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

 

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

 

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.


Krauthammer [Things That Matter]:

Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: There’s More to Life than Politics.

 

But in the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

 

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.

 

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats – poet, romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come – kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics – because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.

 

This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in China’s Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest they – like kite flying and music and other things lovely – disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.

 

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe's senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly – to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state – that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.

 

The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature’s God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.

 

And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man – more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.

 

Which in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and glory, but Disraeli’s mordant exultation “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,” best captured its quotidian essence – grubby, graspmg, manipulative, demagogic, cynical.

 

The most considered and balanced statement of politics’ place in the hierarchy of human disciplines came, naturally, from an American. “I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

 

Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams’ double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture – a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science – before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake.

 

The most optimistic implication of Adams’ dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Jefferson was even less sanguine about the durability of liberty. He wrote that a constitutional revolution might be needed every 20 years. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.

 

To which I have devoted much of my life. And which I do not disdain by any means. Indeed, I intend to write a book on foreign policy and, if nature (or God or Nature’s God) gives me leave, to write yet one more on domestic policy. But this book is intended at least as much for other things. Things that for me, as for Adams, shine most brightly.

Israel in the Lead. By Kathryn Jean Lopez and Caroline Glick.

Israel in the Lead. Caroline Glick interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez. National Review Online, March 20, 2014.

Russia Will Never Be Like Us. By Anne Applebaum.

Russia Will Never Be Like Us. By Anne Applebaum. Slate, March 20, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Russia Without Illusions. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, March 22, 2014.


Applebaum:

There have been high moments: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, locked in a bear hug; George W. Bush looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seeing “a sense of his soul”; Hillary Clinton pressing the “reset button.” There have been some very low moments, too. But for more than 20 years of Russian independence, a single narrative about Russia in the West has nevertheless prevailed.

 

Openly or subconsciously, Western leaders have since 1991 acted on the assumption that Russia is a flawed Western country. Perhaps during the Soviet years it had become different, even deformed. But sooner or later, the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the home of classical ballet, would join what Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, so movingly called “our common European home.”

 

In the 1990s, many people thought Russian progress toward that home simply required new policies: With the right economic reforms, Russians will sooner or later become like us. Others though that if Russia joined the Council of Europe, and if we turned the G-7 into the G-8, then sooner or later Russia would absorb Western values. Such privileges were never even extended to China, which is a far greater economic and political power. This is because we’ve never believed that China would be “Western.” But deep down we believed that Russia would someday join our club.

 

Still others thought that Russia’s forward progress required a certain kind of Western language, a better dialogue. When the relationship deteriorated, President Bush blamed President Clinton. President Obama blamed President Bush. And all of us blamed ourselves. Back in 1999, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story titled “Who Lost Russia?” Much-discussed at the time, it argued that we’d lost Russia “because we pursued agendas that were hopelessly wrong for Russia” and gave bad economic advice. Last week, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, echoed Putin and argued that the United States, by “treating Russia like a loser,” is responsible for the current crisis.

 

These arguments are self-serving: Russian politics has never been “all about us.” In truth, we’ve had very little influence on Russian internal politics since 1991, even when we’ve understood them. The most important changes—the massive transfer of oil and gas from the state to the oligarchs, the return to power of men formed by the KGB, the elimination of free press and political opposition—took place against our advice. The most important military decisions—the invasions of Chechnya and Georgia—met with our protests. Though many appear to believe otherwise, the invasion of Crimea was not primarily intended to provoke the West either. As one astute Russian commentator has noted, the most important lines in Putin’s annexation speech this week were largely overlooked: his reference to the “fifth columnists” and the Western-funded Russian “traitors” who will now have to be silenced. Putin invaded Crimea because Putin needs a war. In a time of slower growth, and with a more restive middle class, he may need some more wars, too. This time, it’s really not about us.

 

But because Crimea is so close to Europe, and because Putin’s new ethnic-nationalist language contains so many echoes of Europe’s bloody past, the Crimean invasion might have a bigger effect on the West than even he intended. In many European capitals, the Crimean events have been a real jolt. For the first time, many are beginning to understand that the narrative is wrong: Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics. The sanctions lists published in Europe this week were laughably short, but the fact that they appeared at all reflects this sea change. For 20 years, nobody has thought about how to “contain” Russia. Now they will.

 

In any case, even the new and longer U.S. sanctions list is only a signal. Far more important, now, are the deeper strategic changes that should flow from our new understanding of Russia. We need to reimagine NATO, to move its forces from Germany to the alliance’s eastern borders. We need to re-examine the presence of Russian money in international financial markets, given that so much “private” Russian money is in fact controlled by the state. We need to look again at our tax shelters and money-laundering laws, given that Russia uses corruption as a tool of foreign policy. Above all we need to examine the West’s energy strategy, given that Russia’s oil and gas assets are also used to manipulate European politics and politicians, and find ways to reduce our dependence.

 

All of this will take time, and for some it may be too late. In Kiev, Ukraine, last week, I met young Ukrainians who were heartbreakingly enthusiastic about the idea that they might, someday, live in a different kind of country. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I didn’t know if they ever would.

Islamic Human Slaugherhouses in Syria. By Walid Shoebat and Theodore Shoebat.

Actual and Literal Islamic Human Slaughterhouses for Christians Discovered. By Walid Shoebat and Theodore Shoebat. Shoebat.com, March 17, 2014. (With extreme graphic videos).

Christians’ Throats Slashed in Pagan Slaughterhouse. By Bob Unruh. WND, March 17, 2014. (With extreme graphic videos.)

Walid Shoebat talks to Mark Levin about the horrendous human slaughter houses run by Syrian rebels. Audio. The Right Scoop, March 19, 2014. Also at Shoebat.com.




Exclusive Rescue Christians / (ISIS) Daesh Human Slaughter Houses in Syria. Video. Christians Agonies, March 16, 2014. YouTube.

Why Obama Will Not Change Gears. By Caroline Glick.

Why Obama will not change gears. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, March 17, 2014.

White Guilt and the American Way of War. By Shelby Steele. NJBR, December 13, 2013.


Glick:

Just before Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated Russia’s takeover of Crimea, the US’s Broadcasting Board of Governors that controls Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty announced that it will be ending its broadcast to Iraq and the Balkans next year.

 

And this makes sense. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Iraq ceased to exist in 2011, when the last US forces got out of the country.

 

As for the Baltics, well, really who cares about them? Russia, after all, wants the same things America does. Everything will be fine.

 

As Obama said to Governor Mitt Romney during one of the 2012 presidential debates, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

 

During the election, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising President Putin’s stand-in Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility,” on missile defense after the presidential election.

 

He asked Medvedev to ask Putin to give him “more space” until after November 2012.

 

With a five-and-half-year record of selling US allies like Poland, the Czech Republic and even the Syrian opposition out to please Putin, it should be obvious that Obama will do nothing effective to show Putin the error of his ways in Ukraine.

 

Obama doesn’t have a problem with Putin.

 

And as long as Putin remains anti-American, he will have no reason to be worried about Obama.

 

Consider Libya. Three years ago this week, NATO forces supported by the US began their campaign to bring down Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

 

As Patrick Coburn noted in The Independent over the weekend, the same Western forces who insisted that their “responsibility to protect” the Libyan people from a possible massacre by Gaddafi’s forces compelled them to bring down Gaddafi and his regime have had nothing to say today about the ongoing bloodbath in post-Gaddafi Libya.

 

Libya is disintegrating today. There is no central governing authority.

 

But Gaddafi, the neutered dictator who quit the terrorism and nuclear-proliferation rackets after the US-led invasion of Iraq, is gone. So no one cares.

 

Coburn mentioned the recent documentary aired on Al Jazeera – America that upended the West’s narrative that the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was the work of the Libyan government. According to a credible Iranian defector, the attack was ordered by Iran and carried out by Palestinian terrorists from Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC.

 

He wrote, “the documentary emphasizes the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.”

 

If the Al Jazeerah documentary is correct, there is good reason for the public in the US, Europe and throughout the world to be angry about the cover-up.

 

But there is no reason to be surprised.

 

Since its inception, the Iranian regime has been at war with the US. It has carried out one act of aggression after another. These have run the gamut from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and holding hostage US diplomats for 444 days, to the use of Lebanese and Palestinian proxies to murder US officials, citizens and soldiers in countless attacks over the intervening 35 years, to building a military presence in Latin America, to developing nuclear weapons.

 

And from its earliest days, the same Iranian regime has been courted by one US administration after another seeking to accommodate Tehran.

 

A similar situation obtains with the Palestinians. Like the Iranians, the PLO has carried out countless acts of terrorism that have killed US officials and citizens.

 

From the 1970 Fatah execution of the US ambassador and deputy chief of mission in Khartoum to the 2003 bombing of the US embassy convoy in Gaza, the PLO has never abandoned terrorism against the US.

 

No less importantly, the PLO is the architect of modern terrorism. From airline hijackings, to the massacre of schoolchildren, from bus bombings to the destabilization of nation states, the PLO is the original author of much of the mayhem and global terrorism the US has led the fight against since the 1980s.

 

And of course, the PLO’s main stated goal is the destruction of Israel, the US’s only dependable ally, and the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

 

Yet, as has been the case with the Iranian regime, successive US administrations have courted, protected and upheld the PLO as moderate, reformed or almost reformed militants.

 

In many ways, then the Obama administration is simply a loyal successor of previous administrations. But in one essential way, it is also different.

 

IN a 2006 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, civil rights historian Shelby Steele argued that the reason the US has lost every war it has fought since World War II despite the fact that it has had the military might to vanquish all of its enemies is “white guilt.”

 

White guilt, he argued, makes its sufferers in the West believe that they lack the moral authority to act due to the stigma of white supremacy and imperialism.

 

Writing of the then raging insurgency in Iraq, Steele explained, “When America – the greatest embodiment of Western power – goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and the other against the past – two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.”

 

This neurotic view of America’s moral underpinning is what explains the instinctive American tendency to strike out at those who do not oppose the West – like Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt – while giving a pass to those who do – like the Palestinians and the Iranians.

 

But whereas white guilt has afflicted the US leadership for the past several generations, past administrations were willing to set it aside when necessary to advance US national security interests.

 

This cannot happen with Obama.

 

Obama owes his presidency to white guilt. His promise to American voters was that by voting for him, they would expiate their guilt for the sins of European imperialists and southern racists.

 

It was the American desire to move beyond the past that enabled a first-term senator with radical connections and the most liberal voting record in the Senate to get elected to the presidency.

 

But tragically for the US and the free world, Obama’s worldview is informed not by an appreciation for what Steele extolled as America’s “moral transformation,” on issue of race. Rather it is informed by his conviction that the US deserves its guilt.

 

Obama does not share Bill Clinton’s view that the US is “the indispensable nation,” although he invoked the term on the campaign trail in 2012.

 

From his behavior toward foe and friend alike, Obama gives the impression that he does not believe the US has the right to stand up for its interests.

 

Moreover, his actions from Israel to Eastern Europe to Egypt and Libya indicate that he believes there is something wrong with nations that support and believe in the US.

 

Their pro-Americanism apparently makes them guilty of white guilt by association.

 

So Iran, the Palestinians and Russia needn’t worry. Obama will not learn from his mistakes, because as far as he is concerned, he hasn't made any.

Vladimir Putin Denounces American Exceptionalism in a Speech to the Russian Parliament.

Vladimir Putin approves draft bill for annexation of Crimea as Russia, slams U.S. opposition. Reuters. New York Daily News, March 18, 2014.

Putin:

Our Western partners headed by the United States prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exceptionalism and their sense of being the chosen ones. That they can decide the destinies of the world, that it is only them who can be right.

Welcome to the 19th Century. WSJ Editorial.

Welcome to the 19th Century. Editorial. The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2014.

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” declared John Kerry on March 2 as Russia began its conquest of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Though he didn’t intend it, the U.S. Secretary of State was summing up the difference between the current leaders of the West who inhabit a fantasy world of international rules and the hard men of the Kremlin who understand the language of power. The 19th-century men are winning.

 

***

 

Vladimir Putin consolidated his hold on Crimea Sunday by forcing a referendum with only two choices. Residents of the Ukrainian region could vote either to join Russia immediately or to do so eventually. The result was a foregone conclusion, midwifed by Russian troops and anti-Ukraine propaganda. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Mr. Kerry's pleas for restraint on Friday in London, and Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing the Crimean takeover a day later.

 

Next up for conquest may be eastern Ukraine. Russian troops are massed on the border, and on Saturday its soldiers and helicopter gunships crossed from Crimea and occupied a natural gas plant on the Ukrainian mainland. Scuffles and demonstrations in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv, egged on by Russian agitators, could create another “trumped up pretext.”

 

And what is to stop Mr. Putin? In the two weeks since Russian troops occupied Crimea, President Obama and Europe have done little but threaten “consequences” that Mr. Putin has little reason to take seriously.

 

The U.S. has refused Ukraine’s request for urgent military aid, and it has merely sent a few NATO planes to the Baltic states and Poland. The Russian strongman might figure he’s better off seizing more territory now and forcing the West to accept his facts on the ground. All the more so given that his domestic popularity is soaring as he seeks to revive the 19th-century Russian empire.

 

Left in shambles are the illusions of Mr. Obama and his fellow liberal internationalists. They arrived at the White House proclaiming that the days of U.S. leadership had to yield to a new collective security enforced by “the international community.” The U.N. would be the vanguard of this new 21st-century order, and “international law” and arms-control treaties would define its rules.

 

Thus Mr. Obama’s initial response to Mr. Putin's Crimean invasion was to declare, like Mr. Kerry, that it is “illegal” because it violates “the Ukrainian constitution and international law.” As if Mr. Putin cares.

 

The 19th-century men understand that what defines international order is the cold logic of political will and military power. With American power in retreat, the revanchists have moved to fill the vacuum with a new world disorder.

 

Backed by Iran and Russia, Bashar Assad is advancing in Syria and may soon crush the opposition. Iran is arming the terrorist militias to the north and south of Israel. China is pressing its regional territorial claims and building its military. And Mr. Putin is blowing apart post-Cold War norms by carving up foreign countries when he feels he can.

 

The question now is whether Mr. Obama and his advisers will shed their 21st-century fantasies and push back against the new Bonapartes. Jimmy Carter finally awoke after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, but Mr. Obama hasn’t shown the same awareness of what is happening on his watch.

 

We’ve written about the need for broad economic and financial sanctions against Russia and its elites. Skeptics reply that Europe will never go along. Even if that’s true—and that would mean a failure of U.S. diplomacy—it shouldn’t deter the U.S. from imposing its own banking and financial sanctions. The world’s banks can be made to face a choice between doing business with Russia or doing business in America. We know from the Bush Administration's experience with North Korea that such sanctions bite.

 

The West must also meet Mr. Putin’s military aggression with a renewed military deterrent. This does not mean a strike on Russia or invading Crimea. It should mean offering military aid to Ukraine to raise the price of further Russian intervention. Above all it means reinforcing NATO to show Mr. Putin that invading a treaty ally would lead to war.

 

The U.S. and Europe should move quickly to forward deploy forces to Poland, the Baltic states and other front-line NATO nations. This should include troops in addition to planes and armor. Reviving an updated version of the Bush-era missile defense installation in Eastern Europe is also warranted, including advanced interceptors that could eventually be used against Russian ICBMs.

 

Russia’s revanchism should also finally awaken Europeans to spend more on their own defense. The 19th-century men know that nationalism isn’t dead as a mobilizing political force. Western Europe’s leaders will have to relearn this reality or their dreams of European peace will be shattered. They need more modern arms of their own in addition to America’s through NATO.

 

In response to the Crimean referendum Sunday, the White House issued a statement declaring that, “In this century, we are long past the days when the international community will stand quietly by while one country forcibly seizes the territory of another.” We shall see, but Mr. Obama first needs to understand that America’s adversaries reject his fanciful 21st-century rules.

Lying About Abbas Won’t Bring Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Lying About Abbas Won’t Bring Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, March 17, 2014.

Obama’s Middle East fallacy. By Jackson Diehl. Washington Post, March 16, 2014. Also here.

Diehl:

Two weeks ago President Obama took time off from the crisis in Ukraine to pursue the foreign policy cause that, together with nuclear disarmament, has been closest to his heart: Israeli-Palestinian peace. Having invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, Obama welcomed him by publicly declaring to Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg that Israel “could face a bleak future — one of international isolation and demographic disaster — if [Netanyahu] refuses to endorse a U.S. drafted framework agreement for peace,” as Goldberg summed it up.

 

Fair enough, you might say: An April 29 deadline for obtaining agreement to the framework is getting close, so it’s time for a little presidential arm-twisting. It follows that when Mahmoud Abbas troops into the Oval Office for his meeting on Monday, he should be met with equally dire predictions of Palestinian doom if he fails to accept the framework.

 

So far, there’s no sign of it: no presidential interviews, no statements by Secretary of State John Kerry, no leaks of potential U.S. punitive measures if Abbas — repeating a long personal and Palestinian history — says no. Therein lies the fallacy that has hamstrung Obama’s Middle East diplomacy for the past five years.

 

Obama, as he made clear in the Goldberg interview, perceives Abbas as the golden key to Mideast peace — “the most politically moderate leader the Palestinians may ever have,” as Goldberg paraphrased it — and Netanyahu as the potential spoiler. “I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist,” the president said. “You’ve got a partner on the other side who is prepared to negotiate seriously . . . for us not to seize this moment I think would be a great mistake.”

 

But is Obama right about Abbas? Netanyahu, like most Israelis, doesn’t think so — and with some reason. The Palestinian president — who was elected to a four-year term in 2005 and has remained in office for five years after its expiration — turned down President George W. Bush’s request that he sign on to a similar framework in 2008. In 2010, after Obama strong-armed Netanyahu into declaring a moratorium on Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, Abbas refused to negotiate for nine of the designated 10 months, then broke off the talks after two meetings.

 

Abbas agreed to Kerry’s proposal for another nine-month negotiating window last year in exchange for Israel’s release of more than 100 Palestinian prisoners, including many convicted of murdering civilians. Abbas hailed them as heroes. Then he embarked on a public campaign to deep-six the two principal provisions Israel has sought in the U.S. framework, both of which have had Washington’s support. One would allow Israeli soldiers to remain along the Palestinian-Jordanian border during an extended transition period; the other would involve Palestinian recognition that Israel is a Jewish state.

 

The “Jewish state” question is hard for many non-Israelis to understand: Who cares what Arabs call Israel, so long as they accept it? But for Netanyahu and his followers, the question is essential. Arab leaders have never conceded that a non-Arab state can hold a permanent place in the Middle East, they say. Until they do so, there will be no real peace, because Palestinians will keep pressing to weaken and eventually eliminate Israel’s Jewish majority.

 

Obama and Kerry have endorsed the Jewish-state principle; their hope was to use it to leverage Netanyahu’s acceptance of framework language stipulating that the territory of a Palestinian state would be equal to, if not exactly the same as, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some in the Israeli media are betting that Netanyahu most likely would accept that outcome — albeit with many reservations — even at the risk of losing his right-wing governing coalition. After all, the price of saying no, repeatedly underlined by Kerry and Obama, is daunting: more boycotts, more anti-Israel initiatives at the United Nations, perhaps even another violent Palestinian uprising.

 

In short, Netanyahu has resigned himself to the likelihood that the U.S. framework will include provisions he’s not ready to endorse. Abbas has not. “There is no way. We will not accept,” the Palestinian news agency quoted him as saying of the Jewish-state principle on March 7. Two days later, Abbas persuaded the moribund Arab League to adopt a resolution backing him up. He’s said much the same about Israeli troops on the border.

 

Why does Abbas dare to publicly campaign against the U.S. and Israeli position even before arriving in Washington? Simple: “Abbas believes he can say no to Obama because the U.S. administration will not take any retaliatory measures against the Palestinian Authority,” writes the veteran Israeli-Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh. Instead, Abbas expects to sit back if the talks fail, submit petitions to the United Nations and watch the anti-Israel boycotts mushroom, while paying no price of his own.

 

Perhaps Obama will disabuse him of that notion at their meeting Monday. If not, another “peace process” breakdown is surely coming.

Indivisible Anti-Semitism. By Caroline Glick.

Indivisible anti-Semitism. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, March 14, 2014. Also at FrontPage Magazine.

Glick:

For Europe’s elite, radical and increasingly, violent anti-Zionism has become the anti-Semitism of choice. Among other things, anti-Zionists believe that Israel is inherently illegitimate and necessarily, and purposely, evil. For them, Israel is Nazi Germany.

 

And supporters of Israel are for them the greatest evildoers in the world. They should be accorded no courtesy, and be treated as human scum.

 

This has been made clear, most vividly in recent years on college campuses where pro-Israel supporters are run off campuses, shouted off stages and barred from presenting their views.

 

One recent episode of this sort occurred on March 5 at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where British professor Alan Johnson tried to speak in opposition to an initiative to get the university to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

 

A YouTube video of the event showed how a mob of BDS supporters prevented him from speaking. They shouted curses at him and his colleagues and demanded they “get the f*** off our campus!” Writing of the experience and the hate movement that stands behind it in The Times of Israel, Johnson reported that the student leading the effort to silence him is the head of NUIG’s Palestine Solidarity Society named Joseph Loughnane.

In 2008, Loughnane said, “The Jews run the American media and push their agenda.”

 

Johnson wrote that “the border between being radical and transgressive [toward Israel] and being anti-Semitic is now porous.”

 

Although accurate, Johnson’s assertion understates the problem.

 

Opposing Judaism and Jews, denying Jewish rights to education and ritual observance, and attacking Jews; and opposing the Jewish state, denying Jews their right to self-determination and attacking supporters of the Jewish state, are two sides of the same coin. There is no border – porous or solid between them. They are one and the same.

 

And all anti-Semites know it.

Lies, Damn Lies, and J Street. By Janet Tassel.

Lies, Damn Lies, and J Street. By Janet Tassel. American Thinker, March 16, 2014. Also at Heritage Florida Jewish News.

Putin: The Mask Comes Off, But Will Anybody Care? By Walter Russell Mead.

Putin: The Mask Comes Off, But Will Anybody Care? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, March 15, 2014.

Bill Maher Calls God a “Psychotic Mass Murderer.”

This May Be Bill Maher’s Most Intense Rant Against Religions – All of Them – Yet. By Carol Hartsell. The Huffington Post, March 15, 2014. Video at YouTube.

Bill Maher Calls God a “Psychotic Mass Murderer.” By Rebecca Savastio. Liberty Voice, March 15, 2014.

Bill Maher Absolutely Trashes the Bible and “Psychotic Mass Murderer” God. By Andrew Kirell. Mediaite, March 14, 2014.

Bill Maher and Guests Rail Against “Complacent and Smug” American Exceptionalism. By Matt Wilstein.

Bill Maher and Guests Rail Against “Complacent and Smug” American Exceptionalism. By Matt Wilstein. With Video. Mediaite, March 15, 2014. YouTube.

Liberals Outraged by Cadillac Ad. By Rush Limbaugh. NJBR, March 7, 2014.

New Diet, Sexual Attraction May Have Spurred Europeans’ Lighter Skin. By Michael Balter.

New Diet, Sexual Attraction May Have Spurred Europeans’ Lighter Skin. By Michael Balter. Science Now, March 10, 2014.

Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 y. By Sandra Wilde et al. PNAS, Early Edition, March 5, 2014.

How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes. By Michael Balter. Science Now, January 26, 2014.

The Timing of Pigmentation Lightening in Europeans. Sandra Beleza et al. Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 30, No. 1 (January 2013).

Ancient Hunter-Gatherers Kept In Touch. By Michael Balter. Science Now, June 28, 2012.

Israelis Don’t Care That We Hate Them. But They’d Like to Know Why. By Brendan O’Neill.

Israelis don’t care that we hate them. But they’d like to know why. By Brendan O’Neill. The Spectator, March 15, 2014.

Love-Hate Relationship. By Liat Collins. Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2014.


O’Neill:

Israel is a rogue state for the right-on. It’s the state that it’s super hip to hate. But why? Israel-bashers will say, “Duh, it's because of its crazy military antics,” but that doesn’t add up. Israel’s militarism today is of a far smaller order than it was during the Six-Day War of 1967, and back then most Westerners, including radical leftists, supported the Zionist project.

 

The most interesting explanation I hear for Israel’s unpopularity among latte-sippers comes from Richard Pater, a political analyst from Radlett who has lived in Israel for the past 15 years. (Israel has loads of Jews from boring bits of Britain who have taken the quite wise decision to act on their right to migrate to this far warmer, more exotic part of the world.) “The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad; the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary.”

 

This cuts to the heart of today’s fashionable disdain for little Israel. What many Westerners seem to find most nauseating is that Israel is cocky, confident and committed to preserving its national sovereign rights against all-comers. In short, it’s a lot like we used to be before relativism and anti-modernism. I think that Israel reminds us of our older selves, our pre-EU, pre-green days, when we, too, believed in borders, sovereignty, progress, growth.

 

Now that it’s de rigueur in the right-thinking sections of western society to be post- nationalist and multicultural, to be fashionably uncertain about one’s national identity, the sight of a border-fortifying state offends and outrages us. In the words of George Gilder, author of The Israel Test, Israel is now hated more for its virtues than for its political or militaristic vices. It’s hated for remaining devoted to “freedom and capitalism” when we’re all supposed to be snooty about such things.

 

If Israel is unofficially being made into a pariah state, it isn’t because of its foreignness, or even necessarily its Jewishness, but rather because it is too western for our liking. We loathe it because we loathe ourselves.

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist as a Jewish State? By Ali Abunimah.

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist as a Jewish State?: An excerpt from Ali Abunimah’s “The Battle for Justice in Palestine.” By Ali Abunimah. Mondoweiss, March 14, 2014.

Reclaiming Self-Determination. By Ali Abunimah. Al-Shabaka, May 21, 2010. PDF. Also here.

M.J. Rosenberg’s Critique of BDS Movement and Ali Abunimah’s Book “The Battle for Justice in Palestine.” Partners for Progressive Israel, March 19, 2014.

Blaming Kerry for Palestinian Rejectionism. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Blaming Kerry for Palestinian Rejectionism. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, March 13, 2014.

Kerry’s Unprepared for the Palestinian “No.” By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, March 14, 2014.

Fatah Central Committee Member Abbas Zaki: Allah Will Gather Israelis so Palestinians Can Kill Them. By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik.

Allah will gather Israelis so Palestinians can kill them, says senior Palestinian official Abbas Zaki. By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik. Palestinian Media Watch, March 13, 2014. Video at YouTube.

BDS Bullies at Galway University. By Alan Johnson.

BDS Bullies at Galway University. By Alan Johnson. The Times of Israel, March 10, 2014. Video at YouTube.

The Apartheid Smear. By Alan Johnson. BICOM, February 2014.

BDS in Galway: “You’re f-ing Zionist, f-ing pricks, get the f–k off our campus.” By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, March 7, 2014.

Will Galway Univ. anti-Israel F-bomber get away with shout down? By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, March 12, 2014.

Why Make Light of PLO Non-Recognition of Israel? By Caroline Glick.

Why Make Light of PLO Non-Recognition of Israel? By Caroline Glick. Real Clear World, March 12, 2014. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

Why the Kerry Middle East Peace Framework Will Fail. By Rabbi Michael Lerner.

Why the Kerry Middle East Peace Framework Will Fail. By Rabbi Michael Lerner. The Huffington Post, March 11, 2014.