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Jewish World Review August 28, 2009 / 8 Elul 5769 The rigged game By Caroline B. Glick
Israel should refuse this offer.
What the Guardian account shows is an Obama administration looking to
blame Israel for the failure of its policy of attempting to appease the
likes of Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
Come September, US President Barack Obama is going to have a difficult time
of it. Obama set a September deadline for his strategy of diplomatically
courting the mullahs. This policy involves deferring further sanctions
against Iran and all but openly renouncing the option of using military
force to destroy Iran's nuclear installations while waiting politely for the
mullahs to sit down for tea with US officials.
Far from accepting Obama's offer, the Iranians have spit on it. Indeed, they
have been too busy brutalizing their own people and building bombs and
missiles to even respond to him directly. Instead, they have signaled their
contempt for Obama by promoting known arch terrorists to high office. For
instance Ahmadinejad just appointed Ahmad Vahidi, the suspected mastermind
of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85
people and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia where 19 US
servicemen and women were murdered to serve as Defense Minister.
In support of Obama's appeasement efforts, both the House and the Senate
Foreign Relations committees set aside veto-proof bills that would place
sanctions on companies exporting refined fuel to Iran. But Congress, now on
summer recess, reconvenes in September and members are anxiously awaiting a
green light from the White House to put the bills before a vote.
So unless something saves him, Obama will look like quite a fool next month.
His appeasement policy has given the mullahs eight precious months of
unimpeded work at their nuclear installations. Their uranium enrichment
facility at Natanz is now operating some 5,000 centrifuges with another
2,400 centrifuges about to go online. That is an eightfold increase in
centrifuge activity from a year ago.
Obama now turns to Israel to avoid embarrassment. If he can convince Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the White House will only get serious about
Iran's nuclear weapons program if Netanyahu freezes Jewish building in
Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, then Obama can present his sudden willingness
to sign on to veto-proof Congressional sanctions legislation not as a
consequence of his own failure, but as a result of Israeli pressure.
If Obama succeeds in getting Netanyahu on board, the American media
discussion of sanctions will focus on the issue of Israeli power over US
policy. The so-called Israel lobby will be pummeled as pundits argue about
whether Obama was right or wrong to succumb to Israeli pressure to support
Congressional sanctions. No one will remember that Obama was forced to
support the sanctions because he had no other choice, since next month his
engagement policy will become indefensible.
On the other hand, if Israel refuses to play ball and doesn't provide Obama
with a concession which he will be "forced" to pay for with a harder line on
Iran, then he will still have to adopt a harder line on Iran. In this case
however, it will be attributed to the failure of his appeasement policy
towards Iran rather than to the success of his Middle East diplomacy against
Israel.
Obama's apparent interest in setting Israel up as the fall guy for the
failure of his engagement policy is the same policy he will doubtless follow
if matters continue on course and Iran acquires nuclear weapons. At that
point, Obama can be counted on to claim that it was Israel's recalcitrance
in the negotiations with the Palestinians or the Syrians or the Lebanese
that forced the mullahs' hands. That is, he will say it is the absence of
"progress" in the "peace process" due to whatever imagined Israeli
intransigence that made it impossible for the Iranian "moderates" to
convince the "hardliners" to give up their nuclear weapons program.
In Obama's defense it should be noted that at least he worries about being
embarrassed by the failure of his Iran policy. He knows that the
overwhelming majority of Americans consider Iran to be an enemy of their
country. In a poll of US voters taken in May, some 80 percent of Americans
claimed that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute a threat to US national
security and 57 percent said that Israel would be justified in launching a
preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear installations.
Things are different on the other side of the Atlantic. Obama's European
counterparts do not face a comparable situation. They have no reason to fear
being embarrassed when and if Iran emerges as a nuclear power because their
constituents view Israel as threat equal to or greater than Iran.
European politics - particularly as they relate to the Middle East- are not
informed by rational interests so much as they are defined by attitude.
Facts today mean little in Europe. They are easily crushed under the weight
of the fantasies that dominate European political discourse.
The main fantasy governing Europe's attitude towards the Middle East is the
belief in Israeli militaristic venality, fundamentalist messianism, and
territorial greed. It is this fantasy that protects European leaders from
the need to account for their six years of failed appeasement towards Iran
during which Iran has made its swiftest progress towards completing its
nuclear weapons program.
It is the predominance of anti-Israel attitudes throughout the continent
that enables European leaders to make light of the Iranian nuclear threat
even as ever growing swathes of the continent fall within the range of
Iran's ballistic missiles.
A mere glance at the daily Middle East coverage of your standard European
newspaper suffices to demonstrate the depths Europe's obsession with hating
Israel. The absence of peace is always Israel's fault. The fact that the
Arabs have never accepted Israel's right to exist is either whitewashed or
justified. So too, Arab terrorism is explained away while every act - small
and large - that in any way asserts Israel's right to defend itself is
pounced upon as proof of Israel's criminality and brutality.
Case in point is an interview Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor gave to
Germany's Der Spiegel's diplomatic correspondent Erich Follath ahead of
Netanyahu's visit to the country this week. The entire interview consisted
of interchanges like the following:
Follath: You blame Palestinian intransigence [for the absence of peace].
Western leaders are, of course, demanding that the Arab side compromise on
some issues. But they are also putting pressure on Israel to make
concessions, as well, especially when it comes to its aggressive settlement
policy in the West Bank.
Meridor: There is no such policy.
Follath: You don't regard new settlements in the occupied territories as
being a major stumbling block in the peace process?
Meridor: That's exactly why we aren't building new settlements. We haven't
approved any.
Follath: You are sidestepping the issue. US President Barack Obama wouldn't
urge Israel to stop its settlement policies if he didn't have a reason to do
so…
Meridor: What you describe is neither the official policy of Prime Minister
Netanyahu nor the official policy of the government."
Follath's questions, and his dogged determination to ignore everything that
Meridor said reflect this general European propensity to embrace the fantasy
of Israeli criminality over the reality of Israeli willingness to do just
about anything for peace.
Israel has for years based its public diplomacy regarding Iran's nuclear
weapons program on successive governments' assessments that given Iran's
global reach and the threat it poses to global security, states will be more
willing to act to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons than they are to
acknowledge Palestinian terrorism which is employed almost exclusively
against Israel. What Israeli leaders - including Netanyahu - have failed to
recognize is that the antipathy of Europeans towards Israel is so great that
they are willing to explain away Iran's nuclear weapons program because it
is aimed first of all against Israel.
Case in point is yet another screed by Follath published in Der Spiegel in
June. There he characterized Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad as "twins," who are
united in their "apocalyptic religious visions." As he sees it, both are
equally responsible for the rising likelihood of war between Israel and Iran
that is liable to suck in countries around the region and the world. As far
as he - and his loyal readers - are concerned, Israel and Iran deserve each
other.
Such views inevitably temper any propensity European leaders may have to act
against Iran. This was demonstrated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel
during her appearance with Netanyahu in Berlin on Thursday. Merkel rejected
Israel's comparison of Iran's stated aim of destroying Israel to the German
Holocaust saying, "There is no comparison between the Holocaust and the
Iranian nuclear program."
If there is no comparison, then Germany, which she claimed is duty bound to
defend Israel due to the Holocaust, has no obligation to prevent Iran from
becoming a nuclear power.
But if Merkel is wrong, and as a result of the lackadaisical attitude she,
her European colleagues, and the Obama administration have adopted, Iran
acquires nuclear weapons and as promised, uses them to commit a new genocide
of Jewry, she has no reason to worry. The anti-Israel attitude now rampant
in Europe will ensure that she will pay no price, and will not even be
embarrassed for her failure to heed the warnings.
Case in point is the newest Swedish media blood libel against Israel, and
the numerous blood libels - most prominently France 2's Muhammad al Dura
blood libel from September 2000 - that preceded it. Stories like
Aftonbladet's fiction of IDF theft of Palestinian organs and France 2's
false allegation that the IDF murders Arab children sell newspapers and
raise television ratings because the popular animus against Israel is so
great that people are willing to buy newspapers and watch television
networks that propagate obvious lies that feed this irrational hatred.
Indeed, it pays to disseminate such lies.
France 2's Charles Enderlain, the father of the al Dura lie just received
France's Légion d'honneur from President Nicholas Sarkozy. Then too,
anti-Israel activist Felicia Langer just received Germany's Federal Cross of
Honor, and Israel hater Mary Robinson was just awarded the US Presidential
Medal of Freedom.
The lesson of all of this for Israel is clear. Whether Netanyahu is dealing
with Obama or European leaders, the game is rigged against us. Any move that
Israel makes towards these leaders will simply facilitate their further
castigation of the Jewish state and support their clear intentions to do
nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy Israel.
As we have been all too often in our history, today Israel stands alone
against our enemies. We can either defeat them, or we can be defeated. The
choice is ours.
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JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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