Caroline Glick

May 17, 2013, 3:22 AM

Obama and the "Official Truth"

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing.

But in Nakoula's case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn't really arrested for violating the terms of his parole.

Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula's film - and scapegoated Nakoula - for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.

With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS's prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency's prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department's subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.

On the surface, they seem like unrelated events.

But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an "official truth" about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that "official truth."

From the outset of Obama's tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.

Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban.

It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.

For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan's massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother's bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother's jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.

To advance its "official truth," the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran's nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration's foreign policy narrative.

Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration's narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama's claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama's support for the al-Qaida-aligned anti-regime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011.

Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.

For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely - and libelously - accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of "book burning."

Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama's policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America's allies.

Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative's Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration's tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as "bitter" souls who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren't like them."

In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.

And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama's domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups' donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.

We also learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports homosexual marriage. The latter group was led by one of Obama's reelection campaign's co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported Obama's pro-abortion policies.

All of this aligns seamlessly with the Obama administration's demonization of conservative donors like the Koch brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come out over the past several years.

Last July, The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as "less-thank reputable" eight businessmen who supported political action committees associated with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department investigation.

Finally there is the administration's discriminatory treatment of pro-Israel organizations.

A day after Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS department overseeing nonprofit groups, admitted the IRS had been discriminating against groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, we were reminded of the appalling treatment that Z Street, a new pro-Israel organization that opposes Obama's policy toward Israel, received at the hands of the IRS.

Z Street was founded in 2009 and applied for nonprofit status in December 2009. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit in federal court against the IRS. According to court documents, the suit was filed after Z Street was informed by an IRS spokesperson that consideration of its application was being delayed, and could be denied because the IRS has a special policy for dealing with nonprofit applications submitted by groups related to Israel.

According to Z Street's court filings, the IRS official said that all Israel-related organizations are assigned to "a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the administration's public policies."

Around the same time that Z Street's application for nonprofit status hit a brick wall of discriminatory treatment, Commentary magazine, also a nonprofit organization, received a letter from the IRS threatening to revoke its nonprofit status because in 2008 the publication posted the transcript of a speech then Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave at a Commentary dinner in which he endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.

As John Podhoretz, Commentary's editor, wrote last week, to disprove a false charge, the magazine had to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste "dozens upon dozens" of work hours copying two million pages of articles posted on the magazine's website in 2008 to prove that Lieberman's speech was a tiny fraction of the magazine's overall output.

Then, too, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit where I work as the director of the Israel Security Project, was recently subjected to an IRS audit - which it also passed with flying colors.

The Freedom Center's work spans the spectrum from domestic policy to foreign policy, and like Z Street and Commentary, is generally critical of the Obama administration's policy toward Israel.

Finally, there is the administration's obsessive targeting of billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama's top political adviser David Axelrod wrote a letter to Antonio Miguel, a Socialist member of the Spanish parliament, attacking Adelson as "greedy."

Miguel leaked the letter to the media while Adelson was in Spain promoting his Las Vegas Sands casino corporation's plans to build Eurovegas, a casino in Madrid. Axelrod later sent his letter to Obama supporters in an email from the Obama presidential campaign.

Adelson is best known for his support for the US-Israel alliance, and his friendship with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. By calling Adelson "greedy," Axelrod was channeling age-old anti- Semitic imagery, and by inference engaging in it, in his assault against Adelson. In the letter in question, Adelson was the subject of this ad hominem assault due to his support for Romney in the 2012 elections.

The Tea Party movement has to date limited its scope to domestic policy - challenging the growth of the federal government on a host of issues. For its part, still smarting from the unpopularity of former president George W. Bush's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Republican Party has yet to enunciate a clear foreign policy.

The closest thing to a systematic rebuke of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy of courting Islamist movements and regimes and treating US allies in the region with hostility are organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Z Street and Commentary and wealthy donors like Adelson. Their stalwart and articulate support for a strong US alliance with Israel, and a strong and vibrant Israel, are the only coherent challenge to Obama's pro-Islamist foreign policy.

By targeting them, the Obama administration completes the circle of an overall modus operandi of punishing those who oppose and expose the failures of his policies - domestic and foreign. The underlying theme that connects Benghazi to the Tea Party, to the subpoenaing of AP phone records, to Z Street, to Nakoula is that they all have challenged the administration's "official truth."

One can only hope that Obama's thuggish creation and corrupt defense of his "official truth" will anger, disgust - and frighten - all Americans.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 17, 2013 at 3:22 AM

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Channel 10's AMAZING scoop

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This week on the Tribal Update we bring you the Israeli media's response to the scandals now flooding the White House. (In a word, the media here have completely ignored the story.)

We also bring you an interview with a senior executive of Channel 10 - a station that exists only by racking up massive debt to the government. And much, much more!

Enjoy!

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If you are in the United States, Latma is funded by donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project which I direct. If you would like to contribute to our work, which is funded entirely by viewer contributions, please go to this link.

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Posted on May 17, 2013 at 3:15 AM

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May 10, 2013, 6:35 AM

NGOs vs. those who serve Israel

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In 2010, Cpl. Eleanor Joseph became the first female Arab combat soldier in the IDF. Joseph, a Christian Arab told Ma'ariv that her good luck charm is a drawing of the Star of David with the caption: "I have no other land, even when my ground is burning." Her commander drew it for her.

Joseph explained, "It is a phrase that strengthens me. Every time I experience hardship, I read it. Because I was born here. The people I love live here: My parents, my friends. This is a Jewish state? Yes, it is. But it's also my country. I can't imagine living in any other place. I think every person should serve in the army. You live here? You make your home here? Then go defend your country. What does it matter that I'm an Arab?"

Joseph's story represents an incipient trend of integration among Israel's Arab community.

Among other things, this is manifest in the consistently rising number of Israeli Arab students who elect to study in Hebrew-language schools and in the rising number of Israeli Arabs who elect to serve in national service, the civilian equivalent of military service.

A poll of Arab youth carried out in late 2007 made clear how widespread this integrationist impulse has become. Seventy-five percent of Arab youth aged 16 to 22 supported voluntary national service.

And yet, despite these sentiments and developments, Arab Israelis who seek to integrate into Israeli society and reject the separatist messages of their political leaders are forced to contend with extraordinary social pressures and even coercion to prevent them from acting in accordance with their wishes.

A study completed this week by Im Tirtzu exposes the vast array of NGOs generously funded by the supposedly pro-Israel New Israel Fund as well as by foreign governments which are running a campaign to oppose Cpl. Joseph and her comrades - Arabs and Jews alike. Since 1999, these groups have been conducting a campaign to undermine Arab integration into Israeli society specifically and to demoralize and reduce the social standing of those who serve in the IDF, national service and IDF reserves generally. The campaign is being carried out on a dual track of discouraging Israeli Arabs from serving in the IDF or national service, and of opposing government benefits to IDF veterans, reservists and those who undertook national service by claiming that these benefits unjustly discriminate against Israeli Arabs.

Im Tirtzu's report argues that the dual nature of the campaign, underwritten by the same funders, shows that the goal "is to prolong irredentism or non-integration of the Arab sector in order to encourage it to act as a sector demanding national recognition and advance the aim of transforming the State of Israel from a Jewish, democratic state into a bi-national state."

As the report notes, it is common practice in many countries to give government benefits and preferential treatment to military veterans and reservists. The US government provides massive assistance to veterans in employment, education, housing and other areas. The purpose of these benefits is to raise general motivation to serve and to reward those who have because the American people believe that their personal service advances the interests of American society as a whole.

To substantiate its claims against these NIF- and foreign government-financed Israeli NGOs, Im Tirtzu's organized its report as a timeline of efforts undertaken by various NGOs to advance the goals of Arab separatism and reducing the morale and social status of IDF and national service veterans and reservists across the board.

Although the Hebrew-language report is worth reading in its entirety, a few examples will suffice to show the scope of these efforts.

In 1999, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel published a report which claimed it was discriminatory for workplaces to make military service a qualification for employment. The report went so far as to insinuate that Israel could be likened to South Africa's apartheid regime due to workplace preference for veterans.

That report was followed by a series of petitions to the High Court beginning in 2002 submitted by ACRI, Adalah and other groups to overturn laws and government decisions that give preferential treatment to IDF veterans and those who served in national service. The petitions have not led to outright court victories. But in a number of cases, the lawsuits were dropped after the government canceled the benefits under challenge.

These groups have opposed every sort of benefit, including tuition discounts for students, differential reductions on government child allotments for those who served in the military and national service and those who did not, preferential treatment in state land tenders and grants and other housing benefits.

Some of these court cases directly targeted benefits to Arab IDF veterans. For instance in 2005, Adalah petitioned the court against the Israel Lands Authority for making military service a requirement for receiving ILA land grants in Beduin villages. And in 2009, Adalah petitioned the court to revoke preferential treatment to Cirassian veterans in an ILA tender for homesteads in Kfar Kama, a Cirassian village in the Galilee.

ACRI receives nearly a million dollars every year from the NIF, and receives funding as well from the EU, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Ford Foundation and Christian Aid.

Adalah similarly receives massive funding from the NIF, the EU, Switzerland and Scandinavian governments through their joint foreign aid organs. It also receives funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Some of the organizations involved are both funders and participants. For instance, the Abraham Fund has participated in High Court petitions against benefits to those who have served.

And it is also a donor to Mossawa, an Israeli Arab group involved in the campaign. Mossawa was co-founded by NIF's Shatil organization.

According Im Tirtzu's report, active NGO campaigning against Israeli Arab national service and military service began in 2007. That year Baladna, which receives funding from the NIF, spearheaded what has become a continuous campaign to discourage Israeli Arabs from participating in national service. Baladna claims that national service is just military service in disguise.

In its words, "National service is a direct arm of the Israeli Occupation Army and of security frameworks that act and always have acted against the Arab population and the Palestinian nation generally. And so, all attempts to present the notion of civilian service as service for society are founded in a deliberate distortion directed at society generally and against the Arab sector in particular."

Following this line of reasoning, in 2010 Omar Nasser, the head of the Araba Local Council, kicked two Arab women serving in national service out of the local school. Defending his actions Nasser said, "I object in principle to the national service project because I view it as a means of paving the way for male and female volunteers to serve in the military in the future, and I strenuously object to that."

As the Im Tirtzu report indicates, the NGO-led campaign against Israeli Arab military and national service has contributed to a situation in which Israeli Arabs who support such service are subjected to physical abuse, social ostracism, humiliation and harassment.

In October 2012, the Forum for Military Service in the Christian Sector held a conference in Upper Nazareth whose purpose was to encourage Christians to serve in the IDF and national service. Three hundred people participated in the conference. One of the heads of Mosawa wrote a widely distributed article accusing the Christian leadership of collaborating with the IDF. She suggested blacklisting the communal leaders involved.

When word of the conference got out, one priest who participated was banned from the Church of the Annunciation. Another priest had his tires slashed and a blood-stained rag placed at his doorstep.

The children who participated in the conference were singled out for abuse. Their photos were disseminated on Facebook and in the Arab media. They were humiliated by their teachers and classmates.

Soldiers like Eleanor Joseph feel compelled to take off their uniforms before they return home, because when they have worn them home, they have faced harassment. One female IDF soldier reportedly was severely beaten by her neighbors.

The general campaign against benefits for IDF veterans and those who served in national service also involves a similar campaign to demoralize high school students and encourage them not to serve. For instance, in 2008, Social TV, which is supported by the NIF and the US government, broadcast a propaganda film targeting Jewish Israeli youth. Its aim was to discourage them from serving in the IDF.

In 2009, 22 self-proclaimed feminist organizations, many of which are financed by the NIF, launched a campaign to support seven members of New Profile who are under police investigation for launching websites instructing young people how to dodge the draft - a felony offense.

But the main thrust of the anti-military campaign has been to prevent and undermine Knesset and government action to provide benefits for those who serve - Jewish and non-Jewish alike. According to Im Tirtzu, the campaign has intimidated Justice Ministry officials into obstructing bills still before committee hearings.

For instance, in May 2012, at a Knesset Economics Committee hearing on a bill to provide housing benefits for IDF reservists, MK Miri Regev said the bill was being held up because the attorney-general feared legal challenges in the High Court.

This week, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill that would allow IDF soldiers to sue for libel those who wrongly accuse them of having committed war crimes during their military service. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni opposed the bill. Her opposition indicates that the bill may face a similar fate as the Knesset's attempt to provide benefits to reservists.

Military and national service are vital national institutions. Integration of the Israeli Arab community is a vital national interest. It is obscene that a handful of well-funded radicals are able to undermine them both - while paralyzing our representative institutions.

Im Tirtzu's report concludes with a list of recommendations the Knesset and government ministries should take to help those who serve the country, and to protect Israeli Arabs who serve and those who support them. While they are all correct, and should be followed, they do not go far enough. The time has come for the government and the Knesset to rein in the twin forces - the NGO sector and the legal fraternity - which in the name of "democracy" undermine our democracy.

Every election we send our representatives to the Knesset. And every election the vast majority of our elected representatives share our desire to support those who serve in the IDF and national service without reference to their religion, race or gender. We want to support them because they contribute to the general good of all of Israel.

But due to a handful of NGOs that receive their funding from outside Israel from governments and groups that do not share our values and interests, and due to the cooperation they receive from activist judges and radical Justice Ministry attorneys, the will of the people is stymied again and again and again.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 10, 2013 at 6:35 AM

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A song to Jerusalem

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This week on the Tribal Update, the satirical newscast produced every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I founded and run we bring you a song for Jerusalem "Fly your flag" in celebration of Jerusalem Day commemorating the unification of our eternal capital city 46 years ago.

We also bring you an update from the field in Judea and Samaria from our reporter Really Cool.

Enjoy!

Here's the whole show.

And here's the song as a separate clip.

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Posted on May 10, 2013 at 6:20 AM

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May 3, 2013, 3:44 AM

Dershowitz and tragedy

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There are two main reasons that many leftists who are viscerally supportive of Israel have difficulty understanding and defending the Jewish state today. First, the storyline about Israel is deeply distorted.

For instance, this week, Freedom House released its annual report on press freedom around the world. Israel's ranking was reduced from "free" to "partly free."

Freedom House gave three reasons for downgrading Israel's status: the prosecution of Haaretz reporter Uri Blau for holding stolen top-secret documents; Channel 10's difficulties getting its broadcast license renewed; and the success of the Israel Hayom newspaper. As Jonathan Tobin at Commentary noted Wednesday, all of these reasons are fraudulent.

Uri Blau received thousands of top secret documents from Anat Kamm, who stole them from the office of OC Central Command at the end of her military service. The documents were not mere intelligence analyses. They were operational plans, unit information and other highly sensitive information.

Blau lied to investigators who asked him about the documents. He fled to London for months rather than speak to investigators or return the documents.

Yet because Israel prosecuted Blau for these acts - which are felonies - Freedom House decided that Israel constrains press freedom.

Then there is Channel 10. Channel 10 is a poorly managed, unsuccessful company that has gone broke. It owes NIS 110 million which it cannot pay back, including NIS 60m. to the state.

Due to its nonpayment of its debt to the state, the Knesset was set to vote down the renewal of its broadcast license - again, in accordance with the law. To protect themselves from market forces - Channel 10's failed management and staff used their bully pulpit to deflect attention away from their failure and incompetence. They accused the Knesset of trying to silence free speech. Channel 10's allies in the media and the political Left joined their anti-government bandwagon. The Knesset folded.

Channel 10's license was renewed. And its debt to taxpayers remains unpaid.

As for Israel Hayom, Freedom House alleged that the free paper's success in gaining market shares at the expense of other tabloids is part of a nefarious plot by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his friend and Israel Hayom owner Sheldon Adelson to establish a quasi-state-controlled media. Israel Hayom is the first mass circulation Israeli newspaper not aligned with the political Left.

Freedom House's allegations against Adelson and Netanyahu and its championing of bankrupt Channel 10 are based on two guiding notions. First, non-leftist entities - the Knesset, Israel Hayom's editorial board - are inherently opposed to press freedom while the motives of leftist institutions like Haaretz and Channel 10 are as pure as the driven snow.

Second, they imply that media in Israel can only be free if not subjected to market forces or the rule of law.

Clearly both of these underlying assumptions are absurd. Yet they form the basis of Freedom House's damaging allegations against the government.

And that's the thing of it.

Over the past generation, we have been inundated by disinformation from an unlimited number of seemingly credible organizations whose aim is to discredit any development related to Israel that does not advance the positions of the Left. And due to the ubiquity of this disinformation, among wider and wider circles today the belief has taken hold that there is something fundamentally illegitimate about non-leftist Israelis and non-leftist supporters of Israel.

Since most Israelis are not leftist, and since the most outspoken supporters of Israel are not leftists, there is a widening belief - particularly among liberals - that Israelis, Israeli institutions and Israel's supporters are illegitimate.

This brings us to the second reason that it has become so difficult for Americans - and particularly liberal American Jews - who viscerally support Israel, to defend or even understand the Jewish state today.

There is a Western tendency, most pronounced on the anti-colonialist Left, to ignore the nature of the Islamic world generally and the Palestinians in particular, and concentrate their attention on Israel alone.

Case in point is Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz is rightly considered one of Israel's most outspoken defenders in the US. But like his fellow leftist ideologues, Dershowitz apparently does not think that it is important to focus on the nature of things in the Islamic world. Rather than notice current realities, he places his faith in his power to shape the future through his intellect and his willingness to compromise.

In an interview with New York Jewish Week following his participation at Sunday's Jerusalem Post's conference in New York, Dershowitz said he was astonished by both my remarks on Iran and the audience's response to my remarks.

He told the paper, "She said, 'Bombs away,' and they gave her a standing ovation."

One of the things that distinguish the Post's readers from most other news consumers is that our readers have educated themselves in the realities of Israel and the region and pay attention to those realities.

As a consequence, they are less affected by anti-Israel propaganda presented as human rights reports than the vast majority of news consumers in the US.

When I addressed the conference, I said I would limit my discussion of Iran to two words, "Bombs away." I said that because like the Post's readers, I base my analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons program on the nature of the Iranian regime.

The Iranian regime is a totalitarian regime. It has an uninterrupted record of torturing and massacring its citizens. It has threatened to annihilate Israel. It is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

Economic sanctions are only viable against regimes that care about serving their citizenry. A regime that represses its citizens is not going to be moved from its strategic course by international sanctions that embitter the lives of its citizens. Since the Iranian regime does not care about its citizens, it cannot be diverted from its plans to acquire nuclear weapons through economic sanctions, no matter how harsh.

As for reaching an agreement with the Iranian regime that would induce it to end its nuclear weapons program, this aspiration is similarly based on a denial of the nature of the regime. The first act of the regime was to reject the foundations of the international system. The Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in 1979 was not merely an act of war against America. It was a declaration of war against the international legal system. Since then, nothing the Iranian regime has done, including emerging as the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, has brought it closer to accepting the norms of behavior expected from a member of the family of nations. As a consequence, the notion that this regime would honor any nuclear agreement it may sign with the US or any other international party is ridiculous.

Since traditional forms of statecraft that do not involve the use of force are not viable options for statecraft involving Iran, the only viable option for preventing Iran - particularly at this late stage - from becoming a nuclear power is force. If Israel is serious when it says that a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to the Jewish state then Israel must attack Iran's nuclear installations.

Because the Post's readers are informed about the nature of the Iranian regime, they appreciated the message I telegraphed in saying "Bombs away."

But Dershowitz was astonished.

Jewish Week asked Dershowitz about the Jerusalem Post conference because during a panel discussion he and I participated in about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, he angrily attacked the audience for laughing at his plan for renewing negotiations between Israel and the PLO and I angrily rebuked him for doing so.

Dershowitz told the audience that he had presented a plan to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that involved Israel abrogating Jewish property rights in select areas of Judea and Samaria through a so-called settlement freeze. In exchange, the Palestinians would agree to suspend their efforts to delegitimize and criminalize Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court.

In other words, Dershowitz put forth a plan - which he said Abbas responded positively to - that would require Israel to take a step not required by the agreements it already negotiated with the PLO. And in exchange, the Palestinians would temporarily suspend actions they are taking in material breach of the agreements they signed with Israel.

By advocating this "bargain," Dershowitz revealed that his conception of the Palestinians is based on willful blindness to their nature that equals his apparent blindness to the nature of the Iranian regime.

Last Saturday, Abbas gave a speech in which he said that Israel's commitment to the peace process will be measured by its willingness to release Palestinian terrorists from its jails. Last month, Abbas sent his representative to visit the families of jailed Palestinian mass murderers to express his solidarity with them and his admiration for their sons' crimes.

As Aaron Lerner from IMRA pointed out earlier this week, by insisting that all Palestinian terrorists be freed from Israeli prisons, Abbas is saying that there is nothing criminal or wrong about murdering or attempting to murder Israelis. This position alone discredits him as a peace partner.

Abbas's steadfast refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, and his unceasing political warfare against Israel - in breach of signed agreements between Israel and the PLO - are just further proof that he is not a credible partner for peace.

Then there is the nature of the Palestinian people themselves. Unlike the Iranians, who desperately wish to overthrow their regime, according the results of a new Pew survey of the Arab world, Palestinians want more tyranny.

To the extent they oppose their regime, they do so because it is too open. Among other things, 87 percent of Palestinians say a wife must always obey her husband; 89% want to be ruled by Islamic law, and 62% support the death penalty for leaving Islam.

More Palestinians support terrorism against civilians than do citizens in any other Muslim society polled.

Post readers are apparently as familiar with the nature of Palestinians society as they are with the nature of the Iranian regime. And this is why they laughed at Dershowitz's plan for restarting negotiations.

Angered at the audience's response, Dershowitz lashed out against it. He said the thousand people in the hall were irrelevant, that no one listens to them, and that it is good that no one listens to them.

Dershowitz is rightly respected by Zionists across the political spectrum for his willingness to defend Israel against its detractors. And this makes his contemptuous treatment of an audience of its supporters at the conference more tragic than infuriating.

It is the tragedy of our times that basically decent liberals like Dershowitz dismiss as marginal those who base their assessments of Israel and the Middle East on reality, rather than on policy paradigms that are the stuff of negotiations textbooks at Harvard.

It is the tragedy of our times because the people he holds in greatest contempt are the people who have been right about Israel, and about Iran and the Palestinians, time after time after time.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 3, 2013 at 3:44 AM

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