Saturday, November 29, 2014


HISTORY AND CONTROVERSIES REGARDING THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Recommended by Ted Belman 11-30-14


The “Status Quo” on the Temple Mount by Nadav Shragai, JCPA (Nov 2014)
He also recommended The Temple Institute as an excellent resource on the laws pertaining to the Temple Mount.

Friday, November 28, 2014


By Ted Belman 11-29-14
Temple-Mount.jpg
I recently posted  The Israeli Relinquishment of the Temple Mount originally published by the JCPA. In my preface to the article I included a comment by a lawyer.
 Israel Medad, who blogs at MyRightWord and Zion’s Corner wrote to me to tell me the lawyer didn’t get it right. He is the Information and Content Resource coordinator for the Begin Heritage Center. I asked him to provide me with some links which he did. I was so impressed with the content of these articles that I wanted to share them with you.
For anyone who would like to know more about the history and controversies regarding the Temple Mount, they are indispensable.
The “Status Quo” on the Temple Mount by Nadav Shragai, JCPA (Nov 2014)
He also recommended The Temple Institute as an excellent resource on the laws pertaining to the Temple Mount.
While reading these article I realized how woefully uninformed I was on all matters relating to the Temple Mount.

Thursday, November 27, 2014


Alleged Fatwa prohibiting Iran from developing nuclear weapon is fake
 Rachel Avraham  11-27-14

http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/world-news/around-the-globe/alleged-fatwa-prohibiting-iran-from-developing-nuclear-weapon-is-fake-9747?

Moderate Qatari journalist claims the fictional fatwa part of elaborate Iranian disinformation and deception scheme.
Many in the Arab world are skeptical that Iran will give up its nuclear program.  They view any Iranian assurances that they will only pursue their nuclear program for peaceful purposes to be a campaign designed to deceive the west.   These commentators within the Arab world fear that the west will buy into the Iranian deception, granting them either concessions on their nuclear program that will harm Arab interests or, if the Iranians do indeed make concessions on their nuclear power, it will be in exchange for giving the Iranians a free hand to dominate the Arab world. 

According to a report in MEMRI, Qatari journalist Abd Al Hamid Al Ansari wrote in Al Watan: “All signs indicate that Iran will manage to continue its nuclear program. Iran will not step back or give up what it regards as its legitimate right to obtain nuclear technology. According to its viewpoint, if less noble countries, such as Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea, have managed to obtain nuclear weapons, how can the international community deny this to Iran, with its noble civilization?”
“Iran thinks this is its chance, now that the man in the White House is so eager to complete this historic deal and thereby score a historic achievement that previous presidents did not manage to attain,” Al Ansari proclaimed. While Al Ansari agreed that Rouhani is more flexible than previous Iranian leaders, he noted that this is driven by calculated prudence and not be a true desire to reform. He emphasized that Iran will “never undermine Iran's strategic principles.”
“Iran will not make meaningful concessions that will harm its capacity to enrich uranium,” Al Ansari stressed. “If it negotiates over enrichment levels, it will not open all its facilities to inspection, and if it allows the inspection of some, this will be in return for the lifting of the sanctions, if only a gradual one. This explains the statement Rohani made in a meeting with young people. 'You ask me if we are winning in the nuclear negotiations?' he said. 'The answer is yes, we are!'”
“Whoever believes that Iran spent these astronomical sums only for the sake of 'electric energy' is either naïve or a fool,” Al Ansari proclaimed. “One has to throw out one's brain to believe this...! Why does Iran need to produce electricity in dangerous facilities that can disastrously leak radioactivity into the waters of the Gulf and are also very expensive, when it has dozens of sources of cheap and safe energy like oil, gas, hydroelectric dams, and sun and wind-powered facilities?”
Al Ansari noted that despite all of these facts, the Iranians have managed to successfully market their nuclear program as being for civilian purposes and to gain the confidence of the international community utilizing deception: “Iran distributed a fatwa allegedly issued by the Imam Khomeini or by Khamenei banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Iran managed to convince the U.S. president that this fatwa exists and Obama frequently mentions it and tries to convince the American people that it exists!”
Al Ansari asserts that this fatwa does not exist: “In fact, every Muslim knows that such a fatwa contravenes the Koranic verse ‘and prepare against them all that you can’ [Koran 8:60], which obliges the Muslims to use every means of power, including nuclear weapons, to deter the enemies, though not for offensive purposes. Furthermore, any fatwa can be abrogated by a counter-fatwa, according to the circumstances, situation and interests. In addition, the religious principle of taqiyya in dealing with enemies [i.e., hiding one's true beliefs to avoid oppression] is a fundamental principle of the Shia.”
Al Ansari is not the only journalist within the Arab world to be highly critical of the US seeking a rapprochement with Iran. According to MEMRI, a former TV director on Al Arabiya TV declared: “We in the Middle East have serious reservations about these negotiations and the first of them is the secrecy surrounding the talks! Obama’s administration intentionally kept its contacts and negotiations with Tehran a secret, even from its own regional allies.” He noted that such an approach contradicts how the US negotiated with North Korea, where regional allies played a critical part in the negotiations.

An article in Al Sharq Al Aswat criticized the Iran deal for sacrificing Arab interests in order to reconcile with Iran: “Since the Arabs were absent from the talks on Iran's nuclear program in Geneva... they became part of the price of the nuclear deal. What Iran gets in return for giving up the nuclear program is the absence of any constraint on its influence in the Arab countries. That is, Iran has been given a free hand in the region.”
MEMRI noted that Jasser Al Jasser furthermore wrote in the Saudi newspaper Al Jazirah: “Several analysts, if not all, regard Obama's letter to Iran's Supreme Leader as indicative of a pro-Iranian bias and as a continuation of Obama's negative policy towards the Arabs. This because it allows Iran freedom of action in the Arab region despite all the suspicions about the Iranian regime's complicity in terror! This American and Western bias in favor of Iran and against Arab interests refutes everything that has been said about the nature of the U.S. alliance with the Arab countries. The agreement that the Americans currently want to sign with the Iranian regime places the Arab interests 'on the negotiating table,' after the concerned Arab countries have been kept away from the negotiations. The absence of the Arabs from the negotiations has led to the expected results: Iranian interests may grow stronger and gain precedence in the Arab region, at the expense of Arab interests.”
AlWatancartoon.JPG.jpg
Al Watan cartoon declares Iran hiding nuclear weapon at the negotiating table 



From: The Nazi Romance With Islam Has Some Lessons for the United States
By David Mikics|November 24, 2014 

Two new important histories look at Hitler’s fascination with Islam and Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey

In addition to courting Erdogan, President Barack Obama hopes to make use of Iran as a stabilizing regional force. In his most recent personal letter to Ayatollah Khamanei, Obama seems to have made a promise: We will repeal sanctions, fight against ISIS, and preserve the rule of Iran’s client Bashar al Assad as long as Iran agrees to a deal on nuclear weapons.
 But what will the United States get in return? In the best-case scenario—which is far from assured—Iran’s bomb-making abilities will be hindered by the deal they sign. But even an Iran without the bomb cannot be relied on to make the Middle East less conflict-riven.Iranian actions speak for themselves: support for Hezbollah, with its hundred thousand weapons aimed at Israel, and support for Assad, who has massacred his people endlessly and thrown massive numbers of them into concentration camps. 
One thing is certain: If Khamanei and Rouhani are given a larger role in the Middle East, they will not serve U.S. interests, nor those of the majority of Muslims. They will serve their own interests, which are inimical to ours. 

David Mikics,,the author most recently, of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age., is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston.



Nineteen-year-old Israeli Eden Attias dreamed of becoming a DJ one day. His special knack for mastering electronics and technology attracted the attention of the Ordnance Corps of the IDF, who recruited him for basic training in November 2013. But this position with the Israeli army would never be fulfilled. As Attias closed his eyes to sleep on a bus with his fellow soldiers in Nazareth one fateful Wednesday morning, he had no idea that he would never wake up. As the bus rolled to a stop in Afula, Israel, a Palestinian terrorist boarded, pulled out a knife, and stabbed Attias several times in the neck and chest area. Aspiring to one day fill the world with music, Attias would instead succumb to his wounds and die an untimely death.
Attias’ story is sadly not an anomaly; Jews commuting on buses and in cars are frequently attacked by Palestinian terrorists throughout Israel, creating headlines that play across Israeli news television screens all too often.
This political landscape wherein Palestinian extremists see fit to attack Jews going about their daily work serves as the primer for the rationale behind Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s proposed security measure to compel citizens of the Palestinian areas who work in Israel to “return through the same crossing they left so there will be supervision of entry and departure like in any sovereign country that protects itself and takes care to admit foreign residents into its territory in orderly fashion.”
According to Ya’alon, the policy does not ban Israelis and Palestinians from riding the same busses. Instead, it compels Palestinians to exit through the same checkpoint through which they entered, namely the Eyal checkpoint. This will enable the IDF to “better account for the thousands of Palestinian laborers who enter Israel on a daily basis by tracking their return back to the West Bank.”
To be sure, the pragmatics of this security policy must and should be debated and discussed by Israeli policy makers in the Knesset; that is what democracies do. Yet it must be stressed that this policy does not come out of a vacuum. As noted above, it comes out of a pattern of repeated incidents of aggression towards Jews; any debate must bear these conditions in mind.
But context is a foreign concept to J Street U leaders Catie Stewart and Gabriel Erbs, who describe the policy in a Haaretz article as “segregation” and an act of “denying Palestinian civil rights and self-determination.” In a hit piece published on November 4, Stewart and Erbs invoke the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King to suggest that policy makers trying to protect Jews from racist attacks are themselves guilty of racism.
“The idea of segregated buses should send chills down the spine of anyone who has ever … learned about … the segregated Jim Crow-era American south,” they write, after describing Ya’alon as a bloodthirsty fiend who wants to end the “Palestinian cancer” with “chemotherapy.” Yet both accusations are disingenuous. Yet Ya’alon clearly says, “We do not have intentions to annihilate them [the Palestinians] and we have also expressed readiness to grant them a state, whereas they are unwilling to recognize our right to exist here as a Jewish state.”
Moreover, creating a different bus route so as to deter attacks on Jews is no more “segregationist” than blacks refusing to go through an all-white neighborhood for fear of a lynch mob in the 1950s. Heaven forfend they should value their lives and take reasonable precautions so as to prevent beatings, raping, stabbings, and hangings. No, no, that would be a form of self-imposed “segregation,” a systematic disparaging of white people that should be publicly denounced by human rights folk everywhere.
Unfortunately, in Stewart and Erbs’s world, inversion is in vogue. Protection from racists becomes racism and a person’s right to defend himself is eroded, turning victims into victimizers.
To make matters worse, Stewart and Erb represent an organization that has no qualms about preventing Jewish communities from being established in the West Bank. According to J Street’s website, the very presence of Jewish communities, “undermines the prospects for peace by making Palestinians doubt Israeli motives and commitment.” Erb specifically writes in The Jewish Week that Jewish communities, “fuel inter-group tensions.” To wit, according to Erb, the presence of Jews in certain areas is itself a provocation; it is Jews who are responsible for the incitement against them.
That Stewart and Erb arrogate to themselves the authority to give commentary on the issue of “segregation” when they actively advocate for the establishment of a state which, according to them, must segregate Jews before it comes into fruition, illustrates the absurdity of their own hypocrisy.
And this is what their appraisal of Israeli policy ultimately boils down to: an excess of hyper-idealistic solipsism whereby members of a mutual admiration society think that referencing the name of a prominent civil rights leader means they are just like them. Yet, Dr. King understood fundamentally that a persecuted people will grow tired; they will grow tired of being pelted with stones; they will grow tired of having their children run over with cars; they will grow tired of having their soldiers stabbed to death while they sleep. “So in the midst of their tiredness, these people … rise up and protest against injustice.”
Security officials says that this policy seeks to address that injustice. Perhaps it isn’t the right one; perhaps it is. But one thing is certain: Stewart and Erb’s faux righteous indignation are categorically not.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014


Poll: Arabs Prefer Israel to Palestinian Authority
Tuesday, November 25, 2014 |  Israel Today Staff



The picture painted by the mainstream international media and loud-mouthed anti-Israel advocates is always the same: Israel is a racist and oppressive place to live for Arabs. This, so the argument goes, is particularly true following this week's government approval of the controversial "Jewish State" law.
But, if Israel's such a bad place for non-Jews to live, then why does an overwhelming majority local Arabs prefer life under the rule of the Israeli government, as opposed to the Palestinian Authority?
That was the finding of a survey commissioned by Israel's Channel 10 News and carried out last week by the Statnet research institute, which is headed by Israeli Arab statistician Yousef Makladeh
Makladeh asked fellow Arabs plainly and clearly: "Under which authority do you prefer to live, Israel or the Palestinian Authority?"
A full 77 percent of respondents chose Israel.
This was despite the fact that most respondents said that as a minority, they experience some degree of racism, and that only nine percent felt they enjoy full equality with Israel's Jewish citizens.
An 81 percent majority said they believe Israel is trying to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount, where Jews are currently forbidden to pray, but 84 percent said they oppose the reactionary violence emanating from the Arab sector.
An earlier Peace Index poll found that a 46.5 percent plurality of Israeli Arabs ultimately support allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, which is Judaism's holiest site. Just 34 percent continue to oppose such a change, and 19.5 percent declined to weigh in on the topic.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Ditching Israel, Embracing Iran

 LEE SMITH  11-10-14





Last week, the Obama White House finally clarified its Middle East policy. It’s détente with Iran and a cold war with Israel.

To the administration, Israel isn’t worth the trouble its prime minister causes. As one anonymous Obama official put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, what good is Benjamin Netanyahu if he won’t make peace with the Palestinians? Bibi doesn’t have the nerve of Begin, Rabin, or Sharon, said the unnamed source. The current leader of this longstanding U.S. ally, he added, is “a chickens—t.” 
It’s hardly surprising that the Obama White House is crudely badmouthing Netanyahu; it has tried to undercut him from the beginning. But this isn’t just about the administration’s petulance and pettiness. There seems to be a strategic purpose to heckling Israel’s prime minister. With a possible deal over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in sight, the White House wants to weaken Netanyahu’s ability to challenge an Iran agreement. 
Another unnamed Obama official told Goldberg that Netanyahu is all bluster when it comes to the Islamic Republic. The Israeli leader calls the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program an existential threat, but he’s done nothing about it. And now, said the official, “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

In other words, the White House is openly boasting that it bought the Iranians enough time to get across the finish line. Obama has insisted for five years that his policy is to prevent a nuclear Iran from emerging. In reality, his policy all along was to deter Israel from striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The way Obama sees it, an Iranian bomb may not be desirable, but it’s clearly preferable to an Israeli attack. Not only would an Israeli strike unleash a wave of Iranian terror throughout the region—and perhaps across Europe and the United States as well—it would also alienate what the White House sees as a potential partner. 
The negotiations with Iran were only the most obvious part of the administration’s policy of pressuring Israel. The White House knew the Israelis would have difficulty striking Iranian nuclear facilities so long as there was a chance of a deal. Jerusalem couldn’t risk making itself the enemy of peace and an international pariah. All Netanyahu could do was warn against the bad deal Obama was intent on making.
The White House used plenty of other tools to pressure Jerusalem. For instance, leaks. Virtually every time Israel struck an Iranian arms depot in Syria or a convoy destined for Hezbollah, an administration official leaked it to the press. The White House understood that publicizing these strikes would embarrass Bashar al-Assad or Hassan Nasrallah and thereby push them to retaliate against Israel. That was the point of the leaks: to keep Israel tentative and afraid of taking matters into its own hands. 
Another instrument of pressure was military and security cooperation between Israel and the White House—the strongest and closest the two countries have ever enjoyed, say Obama advocates. It allowed administration officials to keep even closer watch on what the Israelis were up to, while trying to make Jerusalem ever more dependent on the administration for its own security. 
Don’t worry, Obama told Israel: I’ve got your back. I don’t bluff. The Iranians won’t get a bomb. And besides, the real problem in the region, the White House said time and again, is Israeli settlements. It’s the lack of progress between Jerusalem and Ramallah that destabilizes the region. As John Kerry said recently, the stalled Arab-Israeli peace process is what gave rise to the Islamic State.
From the White House’s perspective, then, Israel is the source of regional instability. Iran, on the other hand, is a force for stability. It is a rational actor, Obama has explained, pursuing its own interests. The White House, moreover, shares some of those interests—like rolling back the Islamic State. 
The fact that Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani now calls the shots in four Arab capitals—Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanaa—makes him the Middle East’s indispensable man. Compared with the one-stop shopping Obama can do in Tehran to solve his Middle East problems, what can Israel offer? 
The Obama administration’s Middle East policy, finally clarified last week, is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Islamic Republic. The question is whether the White House has also misunderstood the character of a man, the prime minister of Israel, whose courage they mock.

Friday, November 21, 2014


Israel also fights America’s battle

The US Left keep complaining that Israel is the largest recipient, per capita, of US foreign Aid amounting to $3B per year. They totally ignore what the US gets in return, which by all account greatly exceeds the investment. This “aid” should be reclassified as a defense expenditure, which it really is. It would be less that 0.5 % of the total yearly US Defense Budget of $650B. As Ettinger keeps reminding us, if Israel wasn’t looking out after US interests in the ME, the US would have to expend many times more to get the same value. Ted Belman
The rising threat of Islamic terrorism on the U.S. mainland, in pro-U.S. Arab regimes and in Western countries has reaffirmed Israel’s role as the U.S.’s moral and military outpost in the Middle East.
Israel’s strategic role has gained importance against the backdrop of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the drastic cuts in the U.S. defense budget, the resulting erosion of the U.S. posture of deterrence, the collapse of Europe’s power projection, the raging Arab tsunami, growing anti-U.S. sentiments on the Arab street and the unprecedented Islamic threats to vital U.S. economic and national security interests.
In 2014, Israel is facing terrorism from both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The ?latter is a subsidiary of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, which has terrorized pro-U.S. Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan and Egypt, upholding the five-pillar banner: “Allah is our objective; the Quran is the constitution; the prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”
These Arab countries realized that Israel was fighting their battle for them during the recent war in Gaza, so they overtly criticized Hamas and subtly supported Israel. According to The Yemen Times: “The Saudi king, Abdullah, attacked unnamed ‘traitor terrorists,’ who sully the name of Islam … implying that he viewed Hamas as much of a terrorist group as the Islamic State. … The so-called ‘Arab moderates’ have become even more blatant in their U.S.-Israel alignment … with a vulgar anti-Palestinian position.”
According to Dr. Mira Tzoreff of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies, “The sympathetic opinions voiced in Egypt’s state-run media regarding Israel’s posture ?towards Hamas — even before the 2014 war in Gaza — were unprecedented. … [Egyptian] President [Abdel-Fattah el-] Sissi believes that Hamas was responsible for attacks on Egyptian military and security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula.”
The Saudi daily Al Arabiya ?reported that hundreds of Egyptian soldiers have been killed in Sinai by Ansar Beit al-Maqdis’ jihadist terrorists — associated with ISIS, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood — since June 2014. CNN claims that Israel is fighting a proxy war against Hamas, advancing the homeland security interests of Jordan and the Gulf States.
In 2014, the eyes of the pro-U.S. Arab regimes are upon Israel and its war on Islamic terrorism.
In 2014, Israel is facing Hamas, one of the numerous offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been the most productive incubator of Islamic terror organizations, such as al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad, the Nusra Front, Ahrar ash-Sham, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, Ansar al-Shariah, Taliban, Nigeria’s Boko Haram, etc. These terror organizations strive to establish an Islamic Middle East empire, as a prelude to global domination, bringing the U.S. and the Western world to social, political and military submission, governed by the laws of Islam.
Irrespective of the Palestinian issue, Israel (the “Little Satan”) has been a major obstacle standing in the way of megalomaniacal Islamic imperialism, clipping the wings of terrorism and thereby enhancing the homeland security of pro-U.S. Arab regimes. Meanwhile, according the U.S. (the “Big Satan”), Israel is also a reliable beachhead in the economically and militarily critical Middle East.
In 2014, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq benefit from Israel’s battle experience in general, and its counter-terrorism and urban warfare experience in particular. In 2007, Israel demolished a Syrian-Iranian-North Korean nuclear reactor. In 1982, Israel destroyed 20 advanced Syrian-operated Soviet surface-to-air missile batteries, deployed throughout the world and deemed impregnable by the U.S.
Israel’s unique battle tactics were promptly shared with the U.S. Air Force, enhancing the U.S.’s military edge over Moscow. In 1981, Israel devastated Iraq’s nuclear reactor, sparing the U.S. a nuclear confrontation with Iraq in 1991. On July 4, 1976, Israel’s Entebbe hostage rescue operation was a turning point in the battle against Islamic ?terrorism, inspiring Western democracies and dealing a blow to America’s enemies.
In 1973, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War against Soviet-aligned Egypt and Syria, Israel shared with the U.S. its battle experience, as well as captured Soviet military systems, which provided the U.S. military command and defense industries with a global competitive edge. In 1970, Israel’s military forced pro-Soviet Syria to roll back its invasion of pro-U.S. Jordan in efforts to topple the Hashemite regime. They surged into Saudi Arabia, affording the USSR a dramatic triumph and dealing the U.S. an unprecedented economic and national security blow.
In 1967, Israel obliterated the military forces of Syria and Egypt, aborting an attempt by the pro-Soviet Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to bring down pro-U.S. Persian Gulf regimes, control the supply and price of oil, dominate the Arab world and provide Moscow with a historical victory. In November 1952, following Israel’s performance during the 1948-49 War of Independence, General Omar Bradley, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed to expand strategic cooperation with Israel, only to be rebuffed by the State Department, which was Arab-oriented, denying the U.S. a more effective outpost in the Middle East.
In 2014, the U.S. faces a most vicious Islamic terrorist threat, which benefits from hundreds of sleeper cells on the U.S. mainland, is not amenable to peaceful coexistence and is not driven by the Palestinian issue, but by a 14-century-old intolerant violent Islamic ideology. It behooves the U.S. to learn from history by avoiding, rather than repeating, past mistakes; enhancing — rather than eroding — the mutually beneficial ties with its most stable, reliable, effective, experienced, democratic and unconditional ally, Israel.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

POLLARD UPDATE 11-19-14


1.     POLLARD’S PAROLE PLASTERING
The Jerusalem Post 11-19-14

• 
‘The Jerusalem Post’ reveals the US manipulations behind the failure of Jonathan Pollard’s long-awaited parole hearing, which has been kept secret until now.



http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Pollards-parole-plastering-382301



Today, Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard enters the 30th year of his life sentence for the crime of passing classified information to an ally. As he does so, he is aware that yet another possible door to his long-awaited freedom has just slammed shut.

The first time such a door closed was November 21, 1985, when he was prevented from entering the Israeli Embassy in Washington and arrested outside. Today also marks another significant anniversary: 19 years since the day he became eligible for parole after 10 years in prison.

Since then, he has decided repeatedly not even to try and seek parole, because his release would be conditional, and his lawyers had told him that he had no chance in a parole hearing where the legal deck would be overwhelmingly stacked against him.

Many have questioned why Pollard never even tried the parole path and focused instead on seeking clemency – asking presidents of the United States to commute his life sentence to the time he had already served.

But after so many years of failure, that strategy was secretly reconsidered and replaced last year, according to documents and information revealed exclusively to The Jerusalem Post.

Pollard finally applied for parole in December 2013. The person who persuaded him to take that step was the man in whose hands his fate lies: US President Barack Obama.

Obama’s statements when he came to Israel in March 2013 left no doubt about what approach Pollard should take. The president ended hopes that he would announce clemency for Pollard during the visit as part of a so-called charm offensive.

But he hinted that if Pollard were to apply for parole, he would be treated like any other prisoner.

“I have no plans for releasing Jonathan Pollard immediately, but what I am going to be doing is make sure that he – like every other American who has been sentenced – is accorded the same kinds of review and same examination of the equities that any other individual would be provided,” Obama told Channel 2 anchorwoman Yonit Levi in an interview.

Obama said his obligation as president was to uphold his country’s laws and make sure they were applied consistently, “to make sure that every individual is treated fairly and equally.” 

Here was the opportunity that Pollard had been waiting for. He felt he had been treated unfairly and unequally for so many years, and now the president was hinting – in his view, even promising the Israeli people on record on the highly rated nightly news – that he would fix that.

Pollard’s parole hearing was scheduled for April 1. But then a different opportunity came, the sort Pollard had always made a point of rejecting.

Obama was ready to commute Pollard’s sentence as a gesture to Israel for releasing Israeli Arab prisoners as part of an American-brokered diplomatic process with the Palestinians. That process nearly brought Pollard home in time for the Passover Seder, but it ultimately failed.

Pollard withdrew his parole application so it would not be connected to a trade for terrorists. Only when the trade talk died down did he reapply for a parole hearing, which was scheduled for July 1.

He and the team working for his release then had a limited time to make efforts to ensure the parole hearing would go well. To that end, they enlisted the man who is arguably the most respected Israeli in America – possibly the only Israeli who enjoys a close relationship with Obama: then-president Shimon Peres.

PERES’S ROLE in bringing about Pollard’s release was more than symbolic. He was the prime minister at the time of Pollard’s arrest.

At the time, he did not alert the embassy staff about Pollard to ensure he would be let in, and he gave the US documents with Pollard’s fingerprints that incriminated him.

Many Israelis saw Pollard’s continued incarceration as a lingering stain on Peres’s decades of public service that neither of the medals he recently received in Washington could remove.

The two presidents were due to meet in the US capital during Peres’s final tour in office on June 25, six days before the parole hearing. Peres vowed to the people of Israel to take action for Pollard, and the Israeli agent’s pro-bono lawyers prepared him meticulously.

Respected New York attorneys Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, who have represented Pollard for free for 15 years, met with Peres’s aides extensively to explain how the US parole process worked. Lauer reviewed the information with Peres himself at Washington’s Willard Hotel immediately before he met with Obama.

Peres’s message to Obama was to be the following: You don’t have to grant clemency. In fact, you can distance yourself from the matter completely. Just privately let the US Justice Department know that you don’t oppose paroling Pollard and letting him leave for Israel.

Obama would not need to get his hands dirty, just keep the commitment he had made to Israelis 15 months earlier to treat Pollard fairly, like any other prisoner, and let his parole be assessed naturally on the merits of his case.

Following the meeting, Peres’s diplomatic adviser Nadav Tamir reported back to the lawyers with good news: The message had indeed been delivered.

Peres’s office leaked to the press that Obama had personally referred the matter to his attorney-general and close confidant Eric Holder – the head of the American Justice Department and the chief law-enforcement officer of the US government.

“The entire nation is interested in releasing Pollard, and I am the emissary of the nation,” Peres told reporters after the meeting. “I don’t think of myself as Shimon. I am the representative of the State of Israel, and I speak in the name of its people.”

But he added a realistic yet disheartening caveat when he vowed to “continue to work for Pollard’s release after I finish my term.”

Pollard and his lawyers hoped against hope that his salvation was finally coming, that the Peres-pushing- parole strategy had worked.

The day after the Obama-Peres meeting, Lauer and Semmelman filed a supplemental submission to the US parole commission. The document stressed that Pollard was a model prisoner who had the best possible salient factor score – a measure the US Parole Commission uses to assess a federal prisoner’s likelihood of returning to crime after release, which is the main factor for parole.

The document revealed for the first time that an apartment had been rented for Pollard in the New York area and employment had been obtained for him as an analyst at an investment firm.

“Further incarceration would serve no purpose, as he has been severely punished,” the lawyers wrote. “The commission should set an effective date of parole so that Mr. Pollard can be released as promptly as possible.”

LAUER FLEW to Pollard’s prison in Butner, North Carolina, for the hearing. The deputy chief of the National Security Section of the United States Attorney’s Office Jay Bratt participated in the hearing from Washington by video conference.

Pollard entered the room skeptical but cautiously optimistic, ready to see what his first parole hearing would be like.

But all hopes that the hearing would be fair were dashed immediately. The government’s representatives spoke menacingly, treated Pollard with contempt, prevented Lauer from making his case, and made it clear that the Israeli agent would not see the Jewish state any time soon, if ever. Those present described the hearing as a “kangaroo court” and even “a lynching.”

The rejection letter that the parole commission sent Pollard in August, which the Post exclusively obtained, was also harsh in tone.

“The breadth and scope of the classified information that you sold to the Israelis was the greatest compromise of US security to that date,” the letter said.

“You passed thousands of Top Secret documents to Israeli agents, threatening US relations in the Middle East among the Arab countries.”

The parole commission complained that had it not been for Pollard, the US could have received intelligence from Israel in return for the information he had provided.

“Given all this information, paroling you at this time would depreciate the seriousness of the offense and promote disrespect for the law,” the letter concluded.

The commission wrote that ahead of the 30th anniversary of Pollard’s incarceration, it would conduct another review of the case in February 2015 and another parole hearing five months later.

But when asked whether the government would once again oppose Pollard’s parole next July, a commission official replied, “Absolutely, vigorously” – indicating that it would be no different than the hearing that had just concluded.

The letter indicated that barring parole next year, Pollard would have to continue serving his life sentence, which, due to the laws when he was sentenced, will conclude only in 2030 after 45 years in prison.

Pollard, 60, is suffering from multiple recurring health problems and has been hospitalized several times recently without word getting out to the media.

Chances are he would be unlikely to live that long.

His lawyers were very disturbed by how the hearing turned out. The team working for his release purposely hid the entire parole process from the press and the public until now.

“I was disappointed because I thought that as a result of the Peres-Obama meeting, the government would take a more judicious and fair approach to the hearing,” says Lauer in an interview at his office on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. “There is no basis for the government’s inflammatory statement about the level of harm caused to the US by Pollard.”

Lauer and Semmelman filed an appeal last month, and as of press time they have yet to receive a response.

But no one on Pollard’s team remains optimistic about the possibility of parole.

THE MAIN grounds for the appeal were that the commission had rejected parole on the basis of a 1987 classified memorandum written by then-US defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, which was false at the time and has proven grossly inaccurate in hindsight.

A federal grand jury indicted Weinberger in June 1992 on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in the Iran-Contra Affair. But president George H.W. Bush pardoned him six months later, before the case went to trial.

His paternal great-grandparents left Judaism because of a dispute at a Czech synagogue, and Weinberger and his parents were devoted Christians. Lawrence Korb, who was deputy defense secretary under Weinberger, said his former boss was not anti-Semitic, but he had “almost a visceral dislike” of Israel’s impact on US policy.

The defense secretary and other top US officials at the time were angry at Israel for the June 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Boston University international relations professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla, who had access to intelligence information as a staff member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Post in a phone interview that the officials were upset because they were building up Hussein as an ally and a counterweight to Iran.

That was why the US was not giving Israel information it had agreed to give the Jewish state. Pollard supplied Israel with some of the most vital information to its security – which was being withheld – further angering the US.

Despite his many years in prison, Pollard never had an actual trial. At the request of both the US and Israeli governments, he entered into a plea bargain, which spared both governments a long, difficult, expensive and potentially embarrassing trial.

Pollard fulfilled his end of the bargain, cooperating with the prosecution. Nevertheless, he received a life sentence and a recommendation that he never receive parole – in complete violation of the plea agreement he had reached with the government.

He was never indicted for harming the United States or for compromising codes, agents or war plans. He was never charged with treason, a charge that applies to spying for an enemy state in wartime.

But two months prior to Pollard’s March 1987 sentencing, Weinberger delivered a 46-page classified memorandum to sentencing judge Aubrey Robinson.

Except for briefly at first, neither Pollard nor any of his cleared attorneys have ever been allowed to access the memorandum to challenge its false charges.

The day before sentencing, Weinberger delivered a four-page supplemental memorandum to Robinson in which he falsely accused Pollard of treason.

“It is difficult for me, even in the so-called ‘year of the spy,’ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in the view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US, and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” Weinberger wrote in the memo. “I respectfully submit that any US citizen, and in particular a trusted government official, who sells US secrets to any foreign nation should not be punished merely as a common criminal. Rather the punishment imposed should reflect the perfidy of the individual’s actions, the magnitude of the treason committed, and the needs of national security.”

Pollard was shown the supplemental Weinberger memorandum only once, just moments before sentencing.

Since then, his lawyers’ efforts to see the documents that were used to prosecute him have failed.

HIS LAWYERS renewed those efforts in court with Pollard’s parole application, knowing the government would refer to the Weinberger memo at the hearing. The court denied access, saying that the lawyers lacked a need to know and the court lacked jurisdiction to declassify it.

But Semmelman says what is known of the documents is that Weinberger wrote not about facts, but about predictions and projections of damage Pollard had caused that have proven wrong over time.

In a 2002 interview, journalist Edwin Black asked Weinberger why he had left the Pollard case out of his autobiography. He replied, “Because it was, in a sense, a very minor matter, but made very important.” Asked why, he said, “I don’t know why, it just was.”

Another possible reason for Pollard’s life sentence may have been that Robinson, who had requested the memo from Weinberger, was infuriated by an (incorrect) report that Pollard had provided Israel with information about US satellite monitoring of joint Israeli- South African missile tests.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote in his 1991 book Chutzpah that former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg had told him he’d heard from the African- American judge that he had taken Pollard’s alleged link to the Israel-South African connection into consideration in sentencing him.

“Robinson doesn’t like Israel very much, though he’s no anti-Semite, but this South Africa thing really got his dander up,” Goldberg told Dershowitz. Pollard denied ever having given such information to Israel, and the prosecution did not accuse him of such.

A form in Pollard’s parole file that the prosecution compiled in 1987 says it was the Weinberger memo that persuaded the judge to seek a life sentence. Pollard’s lawyers say that if a memo to which they cannot receive access is being used to deny their client parole, Pollard is not receiving fair or equitable treatment as Obama promised Israelis he would.

That was the premise of a letter to Obama this week from former senior US officials with firsthand knowledge of the classified files in the Pollard case. In the letter, they renewed their past calls for Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence, due to the parole process failing.

“We write to protest the unjust parole process,” they wrote. “Our review of the parole commission decision compels our strongest objections to the conclusions of the commission and our dismay with the deeply flawed process.”

The officials said the commission had written falsely that Pollard’s espionage “was the greatest compromise of US security to that date,” a charge they said was not supported by any evidence in the public record or the classified file.

“The unreliability of the 1987 Weinberger document was known to and ignored by the parole commission,” the officials wrote. “Worse, the parole commission ignored all other documentary evidence that mitigates in favor of Mr. Pollard’s immediate release.”

The officials wrote that Pollard had adequately expressed remorse and served a sentence far more severe than others in the US convicted of spying for an ally, a charge that normally bears a sentence of just two to four years.

“We are deeply troubled that his grossly disproportionate sentence is now continuing into a 30th year of incarceration with no end in sight,” they wrote. “Denying a man his freedom based on a claim of damage that is patently false while ignoring exculpatory documentary evidence and hiding behind a veil of secret evidence is neither fair nor just, and it simply is not the American way.”

Korb, who is one of the signatories to the letter, says in a phone interview that the parole commission should have taken into account not just Weinberger’s opinion, but also the views of former CIA and FBI heads and the former chairmen of congressional intelligence committees who do not oppose parole.

For instance, former FBI head William Webster, who headed the bureau at the time of Pollard’s arrest and later directed the CIA, told the Post in an exclusive interview last year that he no longer opposed Obama commuting his life sentence to time served.

“My reason is that there are circumstances where compassion is in order,” he said. “That can be tested against sentences that have been meted out to others with as serious offenses. All those are matters of judgment that can be made on their own individual facts, but there is nothing there that would lead me to oppose the exercise of commutation.”

Former CIA head James Woolsey even blamed Pollard’s continued incarceration on anti-Semitism, in an interview with the Post’s Caroline Glick.

“My view is that he should be treated like other intelligence assets of allies,” he said. “We spy on some allies, and they have spied on us. Because they’re allies, usually they have only been in prison for a few years. What I said is that people shouldn’t be hung up on him being Jewish or Israeli. Pretend he’s Greek and release him.”

Korb says it bothered him that Webster’s and Woolsey’s statements were ignored at the parole hearing.

“Woolsey saw Pollard’s whole file, and Jim’s a tough guy,” Korb says. “You’ve got to hope that the parole board so overreacted that it will persuade people to say this is really a miscarriage of justice. It already was before.

They broke their plea agreement, for heaven’s sake.”

Korb notes that while he has never seen any concrete damage Pollard caused the US, there were spies like John Walker, who gave the Soviets the information to help track American submarines, and Robert Hanssen, who gave the Soviets a complete list of American double agents and told them about an FBI tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Over the years, Pollard was falsely accused of compromising American agents in Eastern Europe, when it was actually the head of the CIA’s Soviet/Eastern Europe Division, Aldrich Ames, who had committed the crime and then blamed Pollard. Information Ames gave the USSR is estimated to have led to compromising at least 100 US intelligence operations and to the execution of at least 10 American sources.

Codevilla says it should have been obvious that Pollard could not have relayed such information, because his access was limited.

“There were many secrets at the time, but Pollard didn’t have access to any of them,” he says.

THE TEAM working for Pollard’s release has questioned why Obama was willing to release him in April in a swap for Israeli Arab prisoners if the US parole commission really equates Pollard with the likes of Ames, Hanssen and Walker.

An extensive article published in The New Republic in July about how Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic talks broke down revealed that US Secretary of State John Kerry had first proposed to Obama that he use Pollard as a bargaining chip near the start of the nine-month peace process, and then again when the negotiations were breaking down.

“Obama wasn’t going to touch the option unless it facilitated a true breakthrough,” Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon wrote. “Kerry was becoming desperate, though. At the Ritz, he explained to Obama and [national security adviser Susan] Rice that, without Pollard, the talks were days away from collapse (in part because of his initial miscommunication with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu). Obama wasn’t pleased. But late at night, after hours of talking, he gave Kerry the go-ahead. ‘I’m not doing this because I want to, John,’ Obama said. ‘I’m doing this for you.’” Israeli diplomatic sources have revealed since then that in exchange for Pollard, Netanyahu had been ready to carry out the fourth round of Palestinian prisoner releases that included Israeli Arabs, before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took steps that ended the talks. Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett threatened to quit the coalition if the Israeli Arabs were released, but Netanyahu was willing to accept that for Pollard.

Nonetheless, in an interview with Yediot Aharonot last month, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who conducted the negotiations, appeared to blame Bennett and his allies for Pollard’s continued incarceration.

“We reached the point with the US that they were ready to free him,” Livni said. “Those who want him free should ask themselves why he wasn’t freed. The settler leaders who call on every stage for releasing Pollard immediately must ask themselves what their contribution was to him remaining in prison.”

The only other time Pollard’s release was so close also came as part of a diplomatic process. Netanyahu asked then-US president Bill Clinton to release him as part of the 1998 Wye River Accords, in which Israel agreed to withdraw from 13 percent of the West Bank’s Area C.

A source who was updated on Netanyahu’s talks with Clinton at the time said the deal had been so final that Pollard’s parents had been told to get ready for his release, and there had been media packets prepared about him.

But Clinton reneged when CIA director George Tenet reportedly threatened to resign. US negotiator Dennis Ross revealed in his 2005 book The Missing Peace that he had advised Clinton to keep Pollard in prison to use as a bargaining chip for final-status peace talks.

“Is it a big political issue in Israel and will it help Bibi [Netanyahu]?” Clinton asked Ross.

“Yes,” Ross replied, “because he is considered a soldier for Israel” and “there is an ethos in Israel that you never leave a soldier behind in the field. But if you want my advice, I would not release him now. It would be a huge payoff for Bibi; you don’t have many like this in your pocket. I would save it for permanent status.

You will need it later, don’t use it now.”

SUCH ATTITUDES have convinced many that the reason Pollard remains in jail is that the government wants to keep him for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The April round of prisoner releases that included Pollard is technically still on the table, even though there are currently no talks in sight and Netanyahu and Abbas did not meet when they were both in Amman with Kerry last Thursday.

“Pollard is still in prison because he was transformed from an American who committed a crime and was sentenced unjustly, into a tradeable item,” Lauer says.

“Pollard became objectified because he served a purpose in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He’s an asset to be used and not given away.”

Besides behavior in prison, the other grounds for not granting parole are that a prisoner remains a security risk. Pollard’s lawyers say that cannot possibly apply to him anymore.

“The government knows exactly what Pollard knew at the time of his arrest, because he was debriefed by US government experts [while] hooked up to a polygraph machine,” Lauer says. “What could he know that still matters? Where Saddam’s troops were 30 years ago? Where [former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat’s base was in Tunisia?” “There is no basis whatsoever that if released he’d commit any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Semmelman adds. “It’s simply preposterous. He wants to enjoy the rest of his life in freedom, peace and quiet.”

With the parole option tried and failed, Pollard is shifting back to the only option left: clemency from the president of the US. To that end, US Jews will once again be asked to make their voices heard.

Malcolm Hoenlein, who has headed the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations since shortly after Pollard’s arrest, tells the Post in a phone interview that getting Pollard free means persuading not only Obama, but also five US government agencies. Yet he is up to the task.

“It is an outrageous situation, a tragedy that has got to end,” he says.

National Council of Young Israel president Farley Weiss, whose organization has done much to help Pollard, says the news about the failed parole hearing could inspire a new effort to lobby Obama from a Jewish community that wrongly thought Pollard would automatically be released when he completed 30 years in prison.

“This is no way to treat an ally,” Weiss says in a phone interview. “By not giving clemency or parole to Pollard, America is hurting relations with Israel, and it’s wrong. There has been an undercurrent in the Jewish community that he will just get out on parole in a year. This fierce and outrageous denial of parole now will enrage the Jewish community.”

However, Chicago Pollard activist Jack Berger, who was a close friend of Pollard’s parents, expresses doubt that American Jews will do enough to bring about his freedom.

“The American Jewish community leadership should be ashamed that they have totally abandoned Jonathan Pollard,” Berger says in an interview in Jerusalem. “If the Conference of Presidents had any real clout, they should have demanded that Pollard be treated like anyone else convicted of spying. AIPAC should have put pressure on its elected representatives and encouraged Jews to refuse to contribute to candidates until he was free.”

But an American Jewish leader who asks to not be named says over the phone that Pollard himself was at least partially responsible for his own continued incarceration and that the strategy to bring about his release was wrong all along.

“He didn’t apply for parole for 19 years, and instead tried to use political shenanigans and blackmail, so it can be expected that when he finally got a parole hearing, it wouldn’t go too well,” he says.

Yet Pollard’s lawyers remain convinced that although it has so far been unsuccessful, their strategy of seeking presidential commutation remains the only way to get him out of prison. To that end, they hope renewed pressure will begin soon, not only from US Jews, but also from movements for civil liberties.

“The US Jewish leadership and civil liberties movements have failed so far, and now they must take up the Pollard issue and challenge it the right way,” Lauer says. “They could be asking the US administration serious, probing questions to at least obtain substantive reasons to keep him in jail. They can do a lot more to bring about Pollard’s release.”




2.   US Blocks Pollard Parole Request - Again 
  Tova Dvorin 11-19-14

US Justice Department allegedly shoots down Pollard parole request - days before he marks his 30th year in prison.




The Parole Board of the US Justice Department has rejected longtime prisoner Jonathan Pollard's request to be conditionally released, Channel 2 reports Wednesday. 

Jonathan Pollard has recently been the subject of a high-profile campaign for his release. November 21 will mark his thirtieth year of incarceration in a US jail for passing classified security-related information from America to Israel. He was arrested by FBI agents in 1985 and has been held ever since, including eight years in solitary confinement.

Pollard has been suffering from poor health over the past year, and the conditions in which he is being held are allegedly dire, with his basic needs barely being met. 

The argument has been made that Pollard was arrested on charges far less serious than those that landed other spies in jail, yet those spies served a few years's jail time at most, critics noted, slamming the US for "hypocrisy." 

Over 106 MKs attended a special Knesset session in December 2013 to protest US President Barack Obama's refusal to release the prisoner, and signed a petition urging the President to reconsider. 

Several top US officials, including Former Deputy National Security adviser Elliott Abrams, US Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Jonathan Pollard affair Lawrence Korb, and former CIA chief James Woolsey, have also called for Pollard to be released.

Several senior senators have opposed freeing the longtime captive, despite the sharp criticism of Israeli politicians, and even top American officials over the US's harsh treatment of the case.

Pollard has been described multiple times as a "hostage" of the US, a notion which has ramped up criticism against the White House earlier this year. Outrage has simmered further after a reported deal to release Pollard before the Passover holiday in April never materialized. 

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, similarly, promised in September to campaign for Pollard's release during his meetings with Obama, but there has so far been no news of a response. 

After the litany of reports suggesting that the US is adamant about keeping Pollard in prison, Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home) has responded Wednesday night, saying that the rejection crosses a line.

"The US government's ongoing abuse is bordering on evil," Ariel fired. "This is an explicit violation of the Clinton Administration's promise to ensure his release."

"The Prime Minister must strongly demand [Pollard's] immediate release," Ariel continued, "as the [US] government has done for even enemy spies dangerous to the state." 




3. Subject:  If Pollard had  not been Jewish  he would have been free long ago
Date:  March 18, 2013 7:41:36 PM PDT
From:  LTGJC <ltgjcmilopsg3@yahoo.com>
To:  joe biden <info@messages.whitehouse.gov>
Cc:  ltc h <ltchintelstudies@gmail.com>, OPERATIONS OFFICER <splaitmd@gmail.com>

About the time of the Pollard  case, a naval officer named Schwartz

 (non-Jewish) was  caught spying for Saudi Arabia. His information  was detrimental to the United States defense AND it went to the Soviet Union. Because the Saudi Arabians stood up to the US, Schwartz was never punished. Why don't you Jews have the same balls?


Larry Korb, James Woosley, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and many other insiders have called for his release... why can't the ADL face up to the fact that the judge and the prosecution conspired to poison the well against Jonathan Pollard.

 I worked for Casper Weinberger. He was  an anti-Semite. The evaluation  memo was written in part Aldrich Ames which served  as a cover-up for his own espionage.

These  facts  are on the record.

Again I ask: where is the Jewish hcommunity?   Where is the ADL ?

John Train


4.     What About the Defamation of Pollard?

Eytan Meyersdorf    March 19th, 2013


Recently, the Anti-Defamation League, along with several other pro-Israel and Zionist organizations, formed a “broad coalition in support of marriage equality.” The ADL, a long time champion of Jewish rights, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the California bill restricting opposite-gender marriages.

This is an example of the misplaced priorities of the Jewish organizations in America and is a major cause for concern. The ADL slogan, "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all," begs the question, what about Jonathan Pollard – does he not fall under the aforementioned criteria?

In a 2011 interview with Haaretz, ADL Director Abraham Foxman voiced his disappointment with Vice President Joe Biden's unwavering stance regarding Pollard: “It’s almost inhuman to keep him in prison – he served his time and there is no justification to keep him in prison.” Despite the director's beliefs, the organization has yet to take an official stance.

Numerous high level American officials have already called for Pollard's release, namely the former CIA Director James Woolsey and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Most recently, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb came out saying that Pollard's sentence was disproportionate. Yet the ADL still remains silent.

In 1993, Foxman and Chairman Mel Salberg sent personal letters to President Clinton pleading on behalf Pollard - letters lacking ADL letterheads and stressing the disconnection between their personal views and the ADL's position. In 2011, Foxman opted out of visiting Pollard: “I may have gone quietly and privately, but I am certainly not interested in media hype, which is to little avail."

Foxman certainly did not mind the media hype caused by his letter - addressed on ADL stationary - to President Clinton on behalf of March Rich, a wealthy Jew indicted on federal charges of tax evasion and illegally making oil deals with Iran, or of the ADL press release commending President Obama's decision not to deport 800,000 undocumented immigrants. In fact, the ADL usually does not miss an opportunity to decry injustices.

Pollard is the only person in United States history to receive a life sentence for passing classified information to an ally. With the average sentence for such an offense being two to four years, his verdict should have had anti-Semitic, or at the very least, civil rights warnings flashing throughout ADL offices world-wide.

While the ADL has a rich history of Jewish advocacy and commitment, it is transforming into a hypocritical machine with a liberal agenda and double standards. The ADL fights against the defamation of the Jewish people and for justice and fair treatment for all – as long as the two don't clash.

Whether the case of Pollard is falls into the category of "defamation of the Jewish people," or "justice and fair treatment to all," the ADL's indifference goes against its very own mission. Pollard along with other important Jewish matters (Chuck Hagel's appointment as Secretary of Defense for one), have taken a backseat to an array of liberal, non-Jewish, issues.

With the systematic rise of anti-Israel sentiment in the liberal world, the ADL and other Jewish organizations must decide if their loyalties lie with the Jewish people or with the fashionable liberal trend (which, more often than not, is against Israel).

President Obama's visit to Israel presents the ADL and the other Jewish organizations of America with a major opportunity to advocate for Pollard's release.  Already over 180,000 Israelis have signed a petition calling on Obama to mark his visit by releasing Pollard.

The defamation of the Jewish people must be called out and stopped at all times, not only when it is convenient and politically correct to do so.