Middle East Meltdown

By MARTIN SHERMAN

With the Mid-East on the cusp of melt-down, imagine what Isaiah (5:20) would say of proponents of ‘regional integration’: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…”

Worst Chemical Attack in Years; US blames Assad  – New York  Times, April 4, 2017.

Death toll climbs in clashes at Palestinian camp in Lebanon Reuters, April 9, 2017.

Deadly blasts hit Coptic churches in Tanta, Alexandria – Al Jazeera, April 10, 2017.

Five Sudanese soldiers killed in Yemen conflict – Reuters, April 12, 2017.

These four recent headlines, spanning barely a week, bear chilling testimony to the grim and grisly realities of the Arab world.

Barbaric business as usual

After all, had the several score killed in the April 4th chemical attack in Northern Syria been beheaded, or lynched, or burnt alive or slaughtered by any one of the other gruesome methods by which hundreds of thousands of civilians have lost their lives in the Syrian Civil War over the last five years, it is more than likely that their deaths would have gone largely unnoticed and unreported.

Indeed, it would have been nothing more than brutal, barbaric business as usual for the region.

Across virtually the entire Arab world , from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Persian Gulf in the East; from the Sahara desert in the South to the upper reaches  of the Euphrates in the North, naked violence engulfs entire countries – Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya.  Others – like Lebanon and Egypt—are perennially on the cusp of its eruption; and in others (like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), it lurks, simmering just below the surface, constrained only by the iron grip of police-state tyranny.

With painfully few—and dubious—exceptions (such as Iraq, teetering on the brink of failed state status and Tunisia, once the poster-child of the “Arab Spring”, now   increasingly threatened by Jihadi Salafi insurgents—see here and here), the Arab regimes are a noxious brew of theocratic tyrannies, military dictatorships and/or nepotistic monarchies. The violent exchanges that rage throughout the region occur between a wide range of protagonists and across a myriad of schisms: Sunni vs Shia, radicals vs. monarchs, rebel insurgents vs incumbent rulers, Islamist extremists vs traditional regimes.

Death, depravity and despotism

It is against this doleful and daunting backdrop that the fatal follies of the past and of the emerging prescriptions for the future course of what has been perversely dubbed “the peace process”, must be assessed.

For as growing numbers of erstwhile advocates of the two-state paradigm are becoming increasingly skeptical—indeed, even despairing—of its viability within any foreseeable future, rather than admit the enormity of their error, they are now turning to a new false deity, no less preposterous  or perilous than the tarnished chimera of two-statism.

This is the new cult of “regionalism”, which attempts to invert the twisted logic of two- statism—but leaves it just as twisted.

At the core, regionalism is the idea that, rather than strive for an agreement with the Palestinians as a necessary precursor to its acceptance by the states of the region, Israel can, and should, establish a pan-regional alliance with allegedly “moderate” states, driven by a recognition of common threats (the menace of Jihadi cohorts and the specter of nuclear Iran)—thereby paving its way to a resolution of the Palestinian issue.

Central to this new cult is the bizarre belief that Israel’s “integration” into region—which, as we have seen, is little more than a cesspool of death, depravity and despotism –is a goal both necessary and worthy—and one that the nation ought to strive to achieve.

Risible regionalism

Significantly, there are several glaring logical inconsistencies, non sequiturs and factual inaccuracies that plague the regional-integration doctrine.

First of all, as commonly presented, it almost inevitably entails circular reasoning – i.e. Israel should pursue relations with the moderate Arab states as a means of arriving at a resolution of the Palestinian problem; but the only way to arrive at such relations with the Arab world is to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.  So, resolving the Palestinian issue becomes both the objective of the regional-integration and the means to achieve it!

Thus, for instance in an article, Regional integration only way for Israel to achieve security, Atlantic Council senior fellow H.A. Hellyer writes: “…the only realistic way for Israelis to thrive in the long term is for them to be integrated into the wider region, beginning with a comprehensive and just peace settlement…”

This statement is not only of dubious veracity—since Israel seems to be thriving rather well for almost two decades without (thankfully) being “integrated into the wider region—but seems to collide with a later contention by Hellyer, who writes elsewhere: “A sustainable peace for Israelis is predicated on their eventual integration into the wider region.”

So there you have it: “Integration into the wider region” must be preceded by “peace”; but “peace” must be predicated on (i.e. preceded by) “integration into the region”.  Thus, resolving the Palestinian issue (a.k.a. “peace”) is presented both as the cause and effect of integration –having to precede it on the one hand, while being predicated on it, on the other.

Confusing, isn’t it??

Puzzling Pardo

But perhaps one of the most puzzling and perturbing endorsements of the regional-integration paradigm came in a speech delivered by Tamir Pardo the former Head of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service, Mossad.

In it, Pardo identified the emergence of “a rare confluence of interests between Israel and the moderate Arab states.”

Pointing to the drawbacks of relations that are entirely covert, he remarked: “Secret relations that take place “under the radar” are by their nature transitory.” Accordingly, he advocated Israel’s overt integration into the region: “The key to regional integration is to build economic and social bridges between countries, facilitating trade and tourism…. The deeper, the more open and above board relations are, the better suited they will be to survive the inevitable shocks and disruptions that take place from time to time…. Israel’s regional integration is a key to its very survival.”

But he warned “None of this will happen without a resolution of the Palestinian problem.”

There are several disturbing defects—both conceptual and empirical–in this portrayal by Pardo, which seem to indicate that his undoubted ability in covert operations is not matched by a commensurate acumen for political analysis.

So, while Pardo may well be correct in his doubts as to the durability of secret relations, his faith in more overt one seems wildly at odds with Israel’s experience in past decades, causing one to puzzle over what could possibly be the basis  for his unfounded contention, and his reasons for making it.

Puzzling (cont)

Indeed, the examples of Iran and Turkey clearly indicate that robust overt “economic and social bridges” as well as “trade and tourism” are of little value if the regime should change. After all, the relations with pre-revolutionary Iran and pre-Islamist Turkey could hardly have been closer or more cordial.

Yet, with the ascent to power of Khomeini in Iran and Erdogan in Turkey these ties proved, indeed, “transitory”.  Of course, the metamorphosis was particularly dramatic and rapid in Iran, where Israel was transformed from being a trusted ally to a hated enemy almost immediately. In Turkey, the process was more gradual and less drastic, but there can be little comparison between the tight strategic ties of yesteryear and the hostile attitude that prevails today.

This volatility in relations between nations is one of the most profound flaws in the regional-integration proposal—especially when it is predicated on a resolution of the Palestinian issue. For while it is true that countries like Jordan, under the Hashemite dynasty,  Egypt under Sisi, and the incumbent regimes in the Gulf may face common threats, it would be more than a stretch to characterize this as sharing long-term mutual interests with Israel.

Indeed, a yawning gulf separates between the seminal values that define the differing societies – with regard to individual liberties, gender equality, social diversity, religious pluralism—which clearly portends ample room for renewed adversarial relations once the common threat has been eliminated.

Palmerston…on perpetual allies

Israel would do well to heed the words of British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) on the fickleness of nations and their international ties “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

This caveat is particularly pertinent in the case of the regional-integration paradigm. For in essence the deal to be struck is as follows: Israel is called upon to make perilous permanent concessions (to resolve the Palestinian issue) in exchange for a temporary alliance, based on the (ephemeral) word of rulers, who head not only some of the most decadent and despotic regimes on the planet, but also some of the most threatened.

Accordingly, there is little guarantee that the Arab entity that makes commitments toward Israel will be the entity called upon to honor them when need be. After all, what would be the value of any understanding on integration entered into in 2010 with say Syria, or Iraq or Libya…
Moreover, Israel was unable to prevent an Islamist takeover of Gaza.  It is, therefore, highly unlikely that it could prevent an Islamist takeover by a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or an Islamist coup in Jordan.

Thus, given the fact that the concessions Israel is called upon to make to resolve the Palestinian issue, are largely irrevocable, while the pledges given it are largely retractable, any regime change in Cairo and even more so in Amman would have potentially disastrous ramifications.

With an Islamist state abutting the envisaged Palestinian state from the East, dispatching irredentist insurgents to destabilize any purportedly peaceable Palestinian regime in the territory evacuated by Israel; with a regime in Cairo no longer interested in, or capable of, countering the Jihadi warlords in Sinai, pressing against Israel’s 200 km frontier and the land route to Eilat, Israel is likely to rue any credence it placed in regional integration.

The most troubling of questions

But of course the most troubling of questions regarding the regional integration question is this: If the allegedly moderate regimes really desire Israel’s help in confronting formidable common threats (the menace of Jihadi cohorts and the specter of nuclear Iran), why would they predicate that help on precisely the same concessions from Israel that they demanded prior to those threats arising?  And were Israel to refuse those concessions would these “moderates” deny themselves the aid Israel could provide them—for the sake of the Palestinian-Arabs, for whom they have shown consistent disdain and contempt over decades?

Furthermore, if the “moderate” states see Israel’s strength as a determining factor in making it an attractive ally in combatting the common threat of radical Islamism, why would they insist on concessions that weaken it, and expose it to greater perils as a precondition to accepting its aid? Why would they press for concessions that are likely to fall—as they did in Gaza—to the very Jihadi elements that both they, and Israel, see as a common enemy?

Indeed one might ask: Why should Israel have to make any concessions so that the Arab states would deign to accept its aid in their battle against a grave common menace?

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland once sighed “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”   It sure would!

Regional integration: What Isaiah would say?

Of course one can only puzzle over what merit proponents of regional integration see in its implementation. Do they really want Israel to be absorbed into the morass of cruelty, corruption and cronyism that is the Middle East?  What values that pervade their Arab neighbors, would they urge it to adopt in order to “integrate”?

Misogynistic gender bias? Homophobic persecution of gays? Intolerance of social diversity? Repression of minority religious faiths?  Suppression political dissidence?

For were Israel to resist adopting these and other regional values, how on earth could it integrate into the region?

So, with the Mid-East on the cusp of melt-down, one can only imagine what Isaiah (5:20) would say of the proponents of regional integration:  Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.

 The idea is to 'remove the threat by not having civilians there,' officer says.

“Israel plans mass evacuations if war erupts again”

Article re IDF doctrine of mass evacuation of Israeli citizens, as per attached.
Please share.
Malcolm Dash,
Israel Institute for Strategic Strategies

“Codenamed ‘Safe Distance,’ contingency plans would see up to 250,000 civilians cleared out of border communities if they come under major attack by Hamas or Hezbollah”. By IAN DEITCH March 21, 2017, Times of Israel.

  It’s difficult to avoid cynicism when examining the latest, “contingency plans to evacuate up to a quarter-million civilians from border communities to protect them from attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah or other terror groups”.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad is a line from a
   poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1875), it seems that the IDF Chiefs of Staff have become unhinged or plain “mad”. Why they are not imbued with the rich traditions of the IDF of victory and deterrence rather than its new penchant for withdrawal and “evacuation” i.e. surrender to the initiatives of the enemy?

If Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa come under threat, (envisage a Palestinian state, tunnels and missiles etc.), will the IDF evacuate citizens from these urban centers?? To where? To yet to be built littoral islets. What would be the psychological impact on Israel’s population? How will the population respond when its leadership offers up a strategy of “evacuation”? Assuredly
the national morale and will to resist will be undermined and flight become
  preferable to resistance ...And for those Israelis with foreign passports? Will the IDF recommend that they avail themselves of those passports!!.

 Not since the 1967 Six Day war has Israel’s army really known the fruits of
 strategic victory (Some claim that the IDF was victorious in the Yom Kippur
 war. But if nearly 3,000 dead, thousands wounded, territorial concessions
 and financial indebtedness are associated with “victory”, then we need to
 consult an Alice in Wonderland thesaurus).

 Every subsequent encounter with Israel’s enemies, (War of Attrition 1970- 73, Operation Cast Lead, Operation2012),First Intifada, Gaza War 1987–1993 (2008–09) Pillar of Defense have resulted in stalemate, territorial concessions and diplomaticreversals. It is time, indeed past time, to reconsider the role and concepts the IDF has adopted and develop doctrines of warfare that will both protect Israel’s citizenry and create opportunities for victorious strategic outcomes.

  Perhaps Israel should examine our adversaries’ logic and concepts of
warfare rather than the Western logic of planning backward with the objective of defending the status quo ante. Arab rationale appears not to conform to a pre-defined war aim and instead is characterized by creating a dynamic that sets in motion a march towards change and then to taking advantage of the later stage opportunities this dynamic provides, which is to further Arab interests.

  Regrettably it seems that Israel’s officer class has been infected by the
doctrine of progressive liberal left positions, nourished by the legal establishment that restrictive rules of engagement and proportionality  should comply with the “noble” objectives of “humanistic” values. It would be “splendid” if Israel’s enemies played by the same set of rules. Sadly they do not.

Moreover, the IDF has taken upon itself the task of “social engineering” by wading into controversial issues, such as gender and gay integration and the involvement in promoting commercial activity among the Arab communities of Judea and Samaria. Sadly it seems that the IDF has long ago given up on its prime mandate of winning wars and rather sees itself as
  a juggernaut for social change.

The IDF is long overdue for a serious dose of reforms, it is inconceivable that soldiers risk discipline or even prosecution when making life or death decisions in mere minutes, if army lawyers deem their actions outside the rules, even if the engagement was a success. If the Allies had fought World War ll with a mandate to avoid civilian casualties and adhere to proportionality and Political Correctness, plus the threat of war crimes hanging over the heads of Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Tedder, and Patton, I shudder to think what the final outcome of that titanic struggle would have been.

 The IDF by its self-imposed restraints is fast turning itself into a glorified police force. It endeavors to be sensitive to the Arab/Moslem culture and
 tailor its operational responses accordingly. Such sensitivity does not win wars, no matter how much the progressive liberal left may applaud.

And as for the Arab/Moslem culture and its derivative methods and “rules” of engagement, which include, attacking from within civilian communities,
 horrifying beheadings, kidnapping and many other “inhumane” violations, with flagrant disregard for Geneva Conventions. All the while these Islamic forces of evil take advantage of the constrained freedom of action self- imposed by the IDF. Would the Chiefs of Staff really consider putting Israeli soldier’s lives at risk preferable, to offending some contemporary misperception and misapplication of moral humanitarian principles, or the threat of War Crimes?

  When a deadly brew of politicians, lawyers, humanities brainwashed officer class and social engineers formulate the ‘rules” of engagement to meet with unattainable standards, you can be sure that victory will not be their
 guiding principle. By delegating increased authority to field officers and their men and relaxing the rules of engagement, the military will put the combat decision making process into the hands of well trained and experienced Israeli soldiers, rather in those of mostly combat inexperienced legal adjuncts.

Israel’s army is a people’s army and its soldiers drawn from all walks of Israeli society, a society that strives to be just, moral and live by Jewish
 values. It is therefore unacceptable that Israeli “progressive” elites do not place their trust in its warriors who in the end pay the ultimate price. The IDF has become captive to legal sanction and political correctness so much
 so that it has forgotten that their mandate is to protect the state which cannot be done without a strategy for victory.

If the political leadership and the Israeli army do not adopt a strategy of
 “total war”, A war as a war “a la guerre comme a la guerre”, wherein the nation mobilizes its full resources to destroy the military capacity of its enemy and its will to wage war, then a debilitating war of “attrition” will be inflicted on the IDF for which it, and the Israeli public is ill equipped for.

This article was prompted by the headline “Israel plans mass evacuations if war erupts again”. If this concept had been the driving force during the War of Independence or on the eve of the Six Day war it’s more than likely that Israel would not have survived. Israel’s bold leaders, of yesteryear,
pioneers of the return of the Jews to their homeland understood that Israel must take the war to the enemy and that nothing less than victory is the nation’s objective. It’s safe to assume that had the IDF of 1967 been faced with the dual threats of Hamas and Hezbollah, the then Chiefs of Staff’s contingency plan of action would have; in all likelihood produced the headline:
“Israel warns both Hamas and Hezbollah that they should plan mass evacuations of up to 500,000 of their border communities if war erupts again”

Now that’s a winning strategy!!!!

Malcolm Dash,

Director of Operations, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies
    .

HOW NOT TO ANALYZE IRAN’S ELECTIONS

MICHAEL RUBIN / APR. 13, 2017

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/iran/how-not-to-analyze-iran-elections/

In Iran, elections are anything but free.

Every four years, it’s déjà vu all over again. Pundits, the press, and Iran-watchers indulge in horserace analysis of the Iranian presidential race. Will incumbent Hassan Rouhani win a second term? Could a more conservative candidate like Ebrahim Raisi, the Astan Qods Razavi Foundation head and Assembly of Experts member whose name is also often floated as a potential successor to the Supreme Leader, unseat Rouhani? What about a populist like former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

The problem with such analysis is that it assumes an even playing field to Iranian elections. The issue is not simply the Guardian Council, an appointed body which vets candidates for commitment to the Islamic Republic’s principles as defined by the unelected Supreme Leader; this is one of the reasons why only one or two percent of declared candidates are allowed to run. Those whom Western pundits see as ‘reformist’ or ‘moderate’—Rouhani, for example—are actually fringe hardliners if considered against the broader spectrum of the Iranian public at large.

Too many American pundits and politicians are inconsistent with how they read the Iranian political competition. Mohammad Khatami and Rouhani won in 1997 and 2013 respectively as a reflection of the Iranian people’s desire for a more modern, pro-Western future? Then why did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win in 2005? Because the Iranian population had shifted their perspective 180 degrees? In reality, shifts in Iranian administration are a mechanism by which the Iranian supreme leader keeps his own power by preventing any rivals or power centers from sinking roots too deeply.

Ahmadinejad appointed many Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) veterans and the IRGC gained greater power. Rouhani’s election was less a victory for “progressive” forces than an opportunity to clean house. Indeed, Rouhani, whose campaign commercials bragged about how he was the first official to call revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini ‘Imam’ in the messianic sense, fired many of the IRGC veterans and replaced them with their counterparts from the intelligence ministry. In both 2009 and perhaps even in 2013, Khamenei showed his cynicism, in the first case by apparently fudging the results and in the second case, according to Tehran-based diplomats, by boosting Rouhani over the 50 percent mark to spare him and Iran the second round of voting.

In short, each election is not a popularity contest in its own right, but a mechanism by which power rotates.

Another irony of American press treatment of Iranian elections is its uncritical acceptance of Iranian election statistics. While papers and political analysts will pore over polling statistics and participation rates in U.S. and other Western elections, they accept Iranian statistics uncritically. Never mind that Iranian authorities have an incentive to inflate participation rates, which they associate with political legitimacy. If European officials and the American left truly wish the Islamic Republic of Iran to join the family of nations as an equal member, perhaps then it’s time to treat Iran equally and fund NGOs and other groups who can do professional polling and exit surveys across Iran. If Iranian authorities won’t allow this to happen, then the statistics they provide should be put where they belong: in the trash.

Iranian power remains with the supreme leader and Iran’s security services. Projecting notions of American or European electoral politics on the Islamic Republic reflects not reality, but ignorance. When only one percent of candidates pass an ideological litmus test, when women and sectarian minorities are disqualified before the campaign even begins, and when the eventual winner wields little real power, it’s time to call Iranian elections what they are: a farce.

We Join in Expressing Concern: Google’s New Algorithm Will Determine What News Is “Authoritative”

 BEN MARQUIS  4-11-17

Allegedly in the interest of combating patently false “fake news” websites on the internet, Google has unveiled their own Orwellian Ministry of Truth to make determinations on the veracity of various Google search results.

According to Mashable, Google first rolled out the feature in a limited number of countries, but is now utilizing it worldwide to let users know if what they are searching for has been deemed “true” or “false” or somewhere in between by a group of third-party fact-check organizations.

Google published a blog post that somewhat explained the new feature and set forth the rules by which publishers on the internet will have to comply if they want to be included, but made clear that “Only publishers that are algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source of information will qualify for inclusion.”

Google now joins Facebook in acting as Big Brother to “fact check” the things computer users see on the internet for them, placing a sort of “fake news” label on certain search results that may come up.

While this already sounds like something out of “1984” to begin with, it takes on an even more Orwellian feel when one looks at who Google is relying upon to be their “unbiased” and “nonpartisan” Ministry of Truth fact-checking organizations.

According to USA Today, those organizations that will be fact-checking Google search results includes: FactCheck.org, GossipCop.com, PolitiFact.org, Snopes.com, The New York Times and the Washington Post, and that is just for the United States thus far. Some 50 to 100 other international fact-checking organizations will also be taking part in the program.

As the program stands right now, a search will simply bring back a “fact check snippet” along with the search results that makes a general determination of truthfulness and states which organization made that determination.

This early in the game it’s difficult to assess the real effect of Google’s initiative. According to Google, the feature won’t be available for every results — a test search of “was Hillary Clinton at fault in Benghazi?” for instance, failed to turn up any fact-checking, though liberals and conservatives have been doing just that for years.

But the danger is clear.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a collection of liberal-leaning organizations may not judge kindly when it comes to inconvenient facts or conservative viewpoints with which they disagree or that undermine their narratives.

It remained unclear if search results deemed “false” would be buried from view and tossed down the memory hole to be forgotten forever, or if that particularly Orwellian special feature will come in a later update of the program.

 ISRAEL AND OBAMA’S POLITICAL WAR

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Lawmakers and private citizens were repeatedly subjected to condemnations in the media where unnamed administration sources questioned their loyalty, alleged that they were serving the interests of a foreign power against the US, and that in the case of lawmakers, they were bought and paid for by rich Jewish donors.

Eli Lake from Bloomberg set off a firestorm in the US this week with his revelation on Monday that in the last six months of the Obama administration, Susan Rice, former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser, requested that the US intelligence community enable her to use foreign intelligence collection as a means of gathering information about Donald Trump’s advisers.

According to Lake’s story, during the course of the US presidential campaign, and with steadily rising intensity after President Donald Trump won the November 2016 election, Rice used her access to intercepted communications of foreign intelligence targets to gather information on Trump’s advisers. Some of those reports were then leaked, injuriously, to the media in violation of US criminal statute.

Whereas in the normal course of events, the identities of American citizens whose conversations with foreigners are intercepted by the US intelligence community are shielded, in the final months of the Obama administration, Rice repeatedly – on “dozens of occasions” – asked that the identities of Americans who conversed with foreigners be exposed.

The Americans in question were Trump’s advisers.

Lake’s scoop both confirmed and expanded House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s charges from two weeks ago against the Obama White House. Nunes said that he had seen evidence that the Obama administration collected information on incoming Trump administration officials that had no intelligence value. In other words, Nunes alleged that the data gathering was not for national security purposes.

This week’s discovery that Rice played a central role in the intelligence collection regarding Trump’s advisers brings Nunes’s allegations that the outgoing Obama administration conducted surveillance of the Trump team to the highest reaches of the administration. Now that Rice has been exposed, it is impossible to claim that in the event such surveillance occurred, it did not reflect the Obama administration’s concerted policy.

With the exceptions of Obama and his top adviser and confidante Valerie Jarrett, Rice was the top official in the White House.

Lake’s story and subsequent stories have obvious implications for the public’s assessment of Trump’s March 4 allegation on Twitter that Obama spied on him. But the Rice story is equally, if not more, important for what it teaches us about Obama’s mode of governing.

The Rice story strengthens the assessment that for eight years, Obama and his associates weaponized the federal government to wage a political war against their domestic political opponents in a manner that is simply unprecedented.

On Wednesday, Lee Smith noted in Tablet online magazine that the Obama administration’s apparent exploitation of intelligence reports to harm the Trump team was not the first time that the Obama administration acted in this manner.

As Smith recalled, in December 2015 The Wall Street Journal reported that during the domestic political battle surrounding the nuclear deal the Obama administration struck with the Iranian regime, the administration used intelligence intercepts of conversations of Israeli officials to spy on its domestic opponents inside the pro-Israel community and on Capitol Hill.

In the latest iteration of the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence data, administration officials collected and leaked information about members of the incoming Trump administration to undermine its ability to chart a new course in foreign affairs.

The Obama administration’s campaign against the incoming Trump administration was wildly successful.

Due to their efforts, Trump’s national security adviser Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Mike Flynn was forced to resign in a cloud of controversy just three weeks after Trump took office.

Revelations by Lake and others exposed that Flynn was targeted in the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence. The administration used its intelligence intercepts and unmasking of Flynn to cultivate the sense – with no evidence – that Flynn was a Russian plant.

On January 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius published that Flynn had spoken numerous times to Russia’s US Ambassador Sergei Kislyak after Obama levied sanctions on Russia on December 26.

Ignatius reported that in their conversations the subject of those sanctions arose, but that Flynn made no policy determination regarding how the Trump administration would view the sanctions upon entering office.

In other words, Flynn did nothing wrong. He did his job.

But immediately after the story was published, Flynn was tarred and feathered as a Russian agent. He entered office with Trump on January 20, but was declared “controversial,” “embattled” and “compromised” from his first day in office.

The innuendos followed Flynn like a cloud until he was forced to resign, less than three weeks after entering the White House.

Regardless of whether or not Flynn did anything wrong – and no evidence has been proffered to suggest that he did anything wrong – his loss was a severe blow to the Trump administration. In one fell swoop, the Obama administration’s weaponization of foreign intelligence intercepts had brought down the national security adviser.

This brings us to 2015, and the fight in Washington and throughout the US about Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran. In the 2015 operation, the White House allegedly used intercepted communications between US citizens and Israeli diplomats and between Israeli diplomats in Washington and Jerusalem to defame opponents of the nuclear deal. Lawmakers and private citizens were repeatedly subjected to condemnations in the media where unnamed administration sources questioned their loyalty, alleged that they were serving the interests of a foreign power against the US, and that in the case of lawmakers, they were bought and paid for by rich Jewish donors.

Speaking to Smith, a pro-Israel activist who had participated in the battle against the nuclear deal explained how the White House operation worked.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents….

“We began to notice that the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

Weaponizing intelligence reports was only one way that the Obama administration abused its power to weaken, silence and criminalize its domestic opponents.

Weaponizing the IRS was another way.

And just as Obama’s IRS was used to hound conservative groups that opposed Obama’s domestic agenda, so it was used to discriminate against pro-Israel groups that opposed Obama’s Middle East policies.

The most well-known case of such abuse was the IRS’s failure to approve the request for nonprofit status submitted by Z Street, a pro-Israel educational organization.

After being told by the IRS that its application for nonprofit status was being subjected to “special scrutiny” due to its Israel-centric agenda, and the fact that it advocated views that “contradict those of the administration,” Z Street sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination.

The IRS attempted to get the case dismissed, but a panel of three irate federal judges rejected its request.

After slow rolling its response to the lawsuit, ahead of Obama’s departure from office, the IRS suddenly approved Z Street’s request for nonprofit status, seven years after it was first requested.

At the same time, the IRS continued to refuse to provide Z Street with the documents that informed its decision to discriminate against it. And it refused to explain how its decision to discriminate against US citizens in its tax policies on the basis of their political opposition to the administration’s policies was legal.

There are several aspects of the story of Obama’s abuse of power, and the fact that Israel and its US allies were key targets of that abuse, that are important beyond the domestic discourse in the US.

First, the Obama administration’s abuse of foreign intelligence to wage political warfare against pro-Israel activists and lawmakers who support Israel during the Iran battle tells us that the Obama administration viewed supporters of a strong US-Israel alliance as its political enemies. This is remarkable.

Moreover, the fact that Z Street and other US nonprofit groups that espouse positions on Israel at odds to the Obama administration’s views were specifically targeted for discrimination by the IRS indicates that the Obama administration’s political war against US support for Israel was all-encompassing. It wasn’t limited to the realm of foreign policy. It related as well to the ability to Americans to educate their fellow citizens on the need for a robust partnership with a strong Israel.

The second thing that we learn from our deepening understanding of the Obama administration’s apparent weaponization of the federal bureaucracy as a means to defeat and undermine its political opponents is that apparently, Obama’s top aides deliberately acted to undermine Trump’s ability to govern. This is particularly apparent in everything related to foreign policy.

As Adam Kredo from The Washington Free Beacon has documented, in its last months, the Obama administration ensured that the National Security Council’s budget would be depleted, in order to deny the Trump administration the ability to hire new staffers. It hired political appointees into the civil service and then burrowed them in the National Security Council and other key government departments, to undermine and discredit the Trump administration from within.

For instance, in its waning days, the State Department extended Yael Lempert’s tenure at the National Security Council for two years. Lempert is a foreign service officer notorious for her rabid opposition to Israel.

In another example, last July, Obama moved Sahar Nowrouzzadeh from his National Security Council, where Nowrouzzadeh served as Iran director, to the State Department, where he is now in charge of policy planning on Iran and the Persian Gulf.

As professional foreign service officers, both Lempert and Nowrouzzadeh are essentially impossible to fire or move.

In an interview with PBS following Nunes’s revelations, Susan Rice falsely denied that the Obama White House had “unmasked” incoming Trump administration personnel whose conversations with foreigners were intercepted by the intelligence community.

After denying the charges, Rice was asked her view of Trump’s foreign policy so far. Rice responded derisively.

She noted that despite Trump’s criticism of the Obama administration’s lackadaisical and stalled campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the policy the Trump administration is enacting against ISIS on the ground is essentially the same policy that the Obama administration implemented, “as it should be,” she added, with a smirk.

In reality, if indeed Trump is implementing Obama’s ISIS policy, his failure to enact a new policy there, and indeed, the perceived chaos and disarray of his foreign policy across the board, is not a function of Trump’s incompetence or of the inexperience of his advisers. To the extent that Trump has failed to date to enact a clear foreign policy, this week’s disclosures strengthen the sense that his failure owes primarily to the deliberate subversion of his administration by his predecessor.

 THE HORRORS AT HAND

By MARTIN SHERMAN  [4-7-17 ]

Just as Hezbollah or ISIS/A-Qaeda affiliates may well have deployed in the Golan, had Israel withdrawn; so Hamas or other Jihadi elements may deploy on the highlands of Judea-Samaria if Israel withdraws

The action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. – The Oxford Dictionary  

…the Arab states can permit themselves a series of military defeats while Israel cannot afford to lose a single war… a military defeat of Israel would mean the physical extinction of a large part of its population and the political elimination of the Jewish state. …To lose a single war is to lose everything,

Yigal Allon,  Israel: The Case For Defensible Borders , Foreign Affairs, October 1976 

…the lack of minimal territorial expanse places a country in a position of an absolute lack of deterrence. This in itself constitutes almost compulsive temptation to attack Israel from all directions …Without a border which affords security, a country is doomed to destruction in war –Shimon Peres, Tomorrow is Now, 1977

For anyone who really needed it, this week’s horrific chemical airstrike on civilians in Northern Syria provided a jarring reminder of the merciless realities that prevail throughout the Arab world—and of the fate Israel and Israelis would be subject to, were it not for the military might of the IDF.

Brutal bestiality of Hobbesian anarchy

Of course, apart from the means used to perpetrate the latest atrocity, there was nothing really exceptional about it. Indeed, according to the latest estimates only a few score  people (100-150) were killed, a mere fraction of one percent of the fatalities incurred in the ongoing Syrian Civil war, where hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered with unspeakable brutality—beheaded, immolated, disemboweled, dismembered…

But of course, such barbarism is not confined to the Syrian theater. Across virtually all the Arab world, bloodcurdling waves of indiscriminate killings have repeatedly ravaged entire countries. Indeed, as the perversely named “Arab Spring” dramatically underscored, nowhere else is the brutal bestiality of Hobbesian anarchy—as the natural state of the human condition—more vividly demonstrated than in the Arab world.

In stark contrast to Eastern Europe (with the exception of the former Yugoslavia), where the downfall  of despotism led fairly rapidly to a relatively orderly transition to democracy, wherever the restraining “cork” of Leviathan tyranny was removed in the Arab world, violence and bloodshed have swept away any semblance of civil order.

Invariably, whenever vent was given to vox populi, the result was mob rule.  In Egypt, the election of the Muslim Brotherhood brought a noxious mixture of domestic repression, the breakdown of law and order and economic meltdown, only halted—albeit tenuously—by the re-instatement of strict authoritarianism.

Tightening the iron grip of tyranny

In other places, such as the allegedly “moderate” medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia, author of the much-vaunted “Arab Peace Initiative”, the rule of law is only maintained by the tightening of the iron grip of tyranny. Thus in an editorial entitled,  Saudi-Arabia’s-Barbaric-Executions ,the New York Times wrote: “The regime has become only more repressive in the years since the Arab Spring”

This recrimination followed an earlier editorial, Saudi Arabia’s Execution Spree, in which—with slightly greater hyperbole—the “paper of record” reported with alarm: “Saudi Arabia’s justice system has gone into murderous overdrive…”  It warned that many of those “scheduled for imminent execution on terrorist charges…are citizens whose only crime was protesting against the government”, adding ominously:  “This wave of killing has prompted some to compare Saudi Arabia to the Islamic State”.

Reminding its readers of the real nature of the desert kingdom, the Times charged: “the executions were not out of character for Saudi Arabia. The country has a dismal human rights record with its application of stern Islamic law and its repression of women and practitioners of religious traditions other than Sunni Islam.. the mass execution this weekend followed a year in which 158 people were executed, the most in recent history, largely based on vague laws and dubious trials.”

This, then, is the briefest tour d’horizon of the pervasive savagery that permeates large swathes of the Arab world–whether perpetrated by incumbent regimes against its populace or perpetrated against incumbent regimes by its populace.

But for the grace of God…

It is a savagery that is amply reflected in the Palestinian administered areas both in Gaza under Hamas and in the “West Bank” under Fatah.

Curiously, this is somehow never realistically factored into the chronically short-sighted policy proposals Israel is pressured to accept in the typically ill-conceived efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The horrendous potential inherent in this endemic myopia is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the Syrian example.

Up until the outbreak of the of the 2011 civil war, many—including then-US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton—were still referring to the internet-savvy,  British educated eye-doctor, Bashar Assad, as a moderate “reformer”, who could be a credible peace partner for Israel. A veritable chorus of enlightened, erudite voices urged an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in a land-for-peace deal with Damascus.

Today, in view of the gruesome events that have transpired since then – with Assad morphing from reformer to war criminal—it is chillingly clear what a huge error that would have been.

For if, on the one hand, the anti-Assad forces prevail, Israel would almost certainly face the unpalatable prospect of Jihadi forces—associates of ISIS or A ’Qaeda (or both)—deployed on  the Golan Heights, overlooking the city of Tiberias and commanding the Galilee. If, on the other hand,  the pro-Assad forces prevail, Israel would, with similar certainty, face the no more palatable prospect of pro-Iranian Hezbollah forces—or even detachments of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) itself—deployed there.

This is the grim reality that—but for the grace of God—Israel would be forced to confront today had the proponents of land-for-peace carried the day…

Failure to internalize lessons of past 

Yet despite the inescapable lesson that the Syrian episode provides regarding the enormous perils entailed in relinquishing territory, it seems that—inexplicably –nothing, literally nothing, of what should be learned from it has percolated into the consciousness of the decision makers-dealing with the “peace process”.

Indeed, had the land-for-peace advocates prevailed on the Palestinian front, it is more than likely that Israel would be facing a prospect not less perilous than that it would be facing, had it withdrawn from the Golan in pursuit of a forlorn hope of peace.

For as past experience has repeatedly shown, every time territory has been relinquished, or abandoned, to Arab control, that territory has – usually sooner than later – become a platform from which to launch lethal attacks against Israel, almost immediately in Gaza, within months in Judea-Samaria, within years in south Lebanon and after several decades in Sinai, now descending into the depths of depravity and unspeakable brutality, with no good options on the horizon.

Moreover, every time territory was relinquished, or abandoned, by Israel, the security situation that developed was far more menacing than that which preceded it. Significantly the only areas from which Israel is not gravely threatened are those which Israel has not – yet – relinquished in its quest to attain peace – on the Golan, in Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley.

Baffling conundrum for future historians…

Yet despite the accumulating mountain of evidence refuting its feasibility, despite the repeated failures of attempts at its implementation, despite the glaring flaws in its conceptual rationale , the land-for-peace doctrine (or rather dogma), and its equally unfounded corollary of  two-states-for-two-people, still dominates the discourse on the Middle East conflict.

Clearly, this is a situation that will baffle historians of the future. They will struggle to understand why such a fatally flawed and failed formula could endure for so long as the dominant paradigm for the resolution of the conflict. They will grapple with the conundrum of why, despite its minuscule chance for success and huge cost of failure, it was a formula that was widely designated “realistic” and “rational”; why despite the daunting perils it entailed, it was considered “prudent” and “pragmatic”.  They will fail to comprehend why so many, who professed to be “pro-Israel”, obdurately insisted that  Israel demonstrate its good faith by exposing itself—time and time again–to absurd risks and subjecting its citizens to appalling dangers by adopting a policy that has been repeatedly disproven, but somehow never discredited—and certainly never discarded.

But perhaps what future historians will find the most baffling of all is why successive Israeli governments—clearly aware of the grave hazards this formula entailed for their country and their people—never managed to remove it from the discourse and replace it with an alternative  Zionist-compliant prescription for a more secure and stable future.

Indeed, there is little doubt that they will deem the fact that such an alternative paradigm did not emerge to replace the two-state proposal to be a catastrophic failure of the Israeli leadership and a tragic testimony to its intellectual impotence and incompetence.

Again, but for the grace of God…

For just as Israel might have been facing a formidable array of hostile Islamist forces deployed on the terrain commanding the North of the country, had it withdrawn from the Golan and transferred control to a purportedly credible Syrian “peace partner”; so Israel may equally face a formidable array of hostile Islamist forces deployed on the terrain commanding the  coastal megalopolis , if it withdrew from the highlands of Judea-Samaria and transferred control to  a purportedly credible Palestinian “peace partner”.

For once control is relinquished, there is little to ensure that its allegedly peaceable Palestinian partner will not be replaced by some less amicable successor – or even if he remains in power, that he continues to honor his commitments in exchange for which  Israel relinquished the territory. After all, such violation of commitments may not be the result of bad faith on the part of Israel’s “peace partner” but due to pressures of influential domestic rivals.

For just as Hezbollah and/or ISIS/A-Qaeda affiliates may well have taken up positions in the Golan, so Hamas, Islamic Jihad and/or Salafist elements may take up positions on the highlands of Judea-Samaria—whether in compliance with, or in defiance of, Israel’s “peace partner”.

There will, however, be important differences!

The horrors at hand

Whereas in the North the post withdrawal border would have been about 70 km long, abutting a largely rural and relatively sparsely populated region, in the East the post-withdrawal frontier would be anything upward of 500 km, abutting a largely urban and relatively densely populated area.

Indeed, even with primitive weapons, presently available in abundance to the terror organizations in “demilitarized” Gaza, all of the following would be in striking range: Virtually all Israel’s air fields – military and civilian – including its only international airport, Ben Gurion; its major sea ports of Haifa and Ashdod  and naval bases; its centers of civilian government and military command; vital infrastructure installations/systems –including power generation and transmission; desalination plants and water conveyance, communication hubs, major transportation axes (rail and road); and 80% of the nation’s  civilian population and its commercial activity.

Given the combination of tempting vulnerability and the blatant disregard of Israel’s adversaries for human life so graphically demonstrated in recent years, the horrors that any further Israeli withdrawals are likely to result in—for both Jew and Arab—are not difficult to foresee.

For with its hospitals, schools and kindergartens hopelessly exposed to the callous whims of heartless terrorists, Israel will be forced to take massive military action to defend its vulnerable civilian population—whether by preemptive strikes to forestall aggression, or retaliatory operations to deter future attacks. Given the length of the frontier, the nature of the topography and presence of numerous civilian centers together with the robustness of the response required, widespread collateral damage would be inevitable …

Arab attacks, Israeli response, international recriminations, Arab reprisals, Israeli retaliation….

These would be the unavoidable chain of events that will be certain to emerge from continued pursuit of the land-for-peace dogma. These are the horrors at hand it will undoubtedly precipitate…

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.org) is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. (www.strategic-israel.org)

ISIS BORROWS A TACTIC FROM HAMAS

Evelyn Gordon  Commentary  Apr. 5, 2017

ISIS adopts a Hamas terror tactic because it has gotten results.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/terrorism/isis-borrows-tactic-hamas/

The U.S. Army recently announced that it has horrifying video footage of Islamic State fighters herding Iraqi civilians into buildings in Mosul. The plan was not to use them as human shields–that is, to announce their presence in the hope of deterring American airstrikes. Rather, ISIS was deliberately trying to ensure that American troops killed them, by “smuggling civilians into buildings, so we won’t see them and trying to bait the coalition to attack,” an army spokesman said at a briefing for Pentagon reporters. The motive, he explained, was hope that massive civilian casualties would produce such an outcry that the U.S. would halt airstrikes altogether.

There’s an important point to this story which the spokesman neglected to mention: This tactic is borrowed directly from Hamas. And it was borrowed because the world’s response to successive Hamas-Israel wars convinced ISIS that creating massive civilian casualties among residents of its own territory is an effective strategy. Admittedly, Hamas hasn’t yet been caught on video actually herding civilians into buildings before launching attacks from them. But there’s plenty of evidence that Hamas prevented civilians from leaving areas whence it was launching rockets or other attacks at Israel, thereby deliberately exposing them to retaliatory strikes.

During the 2014 Gaza war, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces warned civilians to evacuate the town of Beit Lahiya before launching air strikes at Hamas positions. But according to Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid, who based himself on interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas gunmen showed up and warned that anyone who left the town would be treated as a collaborator. Since Hamas executes collaborators, that was equivalent to saying that anyone who tried to leave would be killed on the spot. Thus, faced with the alternative of certain death at Hamas’s hands, most Beit Lahiya residents understandably opted to stay and take their chances with the IDF.

There’s also plenty of evidence that Hamas deliberately launched attacks from buildings where it knew civilians were present. Just last month, for instance, I wrote about a case during the 2009 Gaza war in which Hamas directed sniper fire at Israeli troops from the third floor of a well-known doctor’s home, thereby forcing the soldiers to choose between becoming sitting ducks or shooting back and risking civilian casualties. Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Hamas was also storing explosives in the house (using civilian buildings as arms caches or wiring them with explosives is standard practice for Hamas). Consequently, when the soldiers fired at the Hamas position, an unexpectedly large explosion ensued, killing three of the doctor’s daughters and one of his nieces.

In short, Hamas repeatedly used tactics aimed at maximizing the number of civilian casualties on its own side. Yet instead of blaming Hamas for this, the world largely blamed Israel. Mass demonstrations were held throughout the West condemning Israel; there were no mass demonstrations condemning Hamas. Journalists and “human rights” organizations issued endless reports blaming Israel for the civilian casualties while ignoring or downplaying Hamas’s role in them. Western leaders repeatedly demanded that Israel show “restraint” and accused it of using disproportionate force. Israel, not Hamas, became the subject of a complaint to the International Criminal Court.

Hamas thereby succeeded in putting Israel in a lose-lose situation. Either it could let Hamas launch thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians with impunity, or it could strike back at the price of global opprobrium.

Alan Dershowitz, who aptly calls this the “dead baby strategy,” has been warning for years that unless it “is exposed and rejected in the marketplace of morality, it’s coming to a theater (or school or hospital) near you.” After all, why wouldn’t other terrorist organizations adopt a strategy that has so obviously proven successful?

Now, ISIS has proven his point: It has chosen to deliberately sacrifice civilians rather than employing the more obvious tactic of using them as human shields. Granted, the organization enjoys killing, but based on its track record, it’s also far from stupid. So if it has concluded that dead civilians are more useful than living human shields, it’s because, like Hamas, it considers this a win-win strategy. At worst, America’s reputation will be tarnished, since many people worldwide will blame it for the civilian casualties rather than putting the blame on ISIS, where it belongs. And at best, negative public opinion will force America to abandon the airstrikes altogether.

Nor is the latter hope as far-fetched as it may seem at first glance. It’s true the “dead baby strategy” never persuaded Israel to stop airstrikes against Hamas, but there’s a fundamental difference between the two cases: Israel’s citizens were under direct attack by Hamas rockets and tunnels, and in a choice between sacrificing its citizens’ lives and suffering global opprobrium, any self-respecting country would choose the latter. But ISIS isn’t launching rockets at America from Mosul; the threat it poses is far less immediate. Consequently, the incentive for America to simply back away from the fight if the civilian death toll climbs too high is much greater.

In short, by blaming Israel for civilian casualties that were actually deliberately caused by Hamas’s actions, the world ensured that other terrorist organizations would adopt a similar strategy. Or to put it more bluntly, it ensured that many more civilians would die, because terrorist groups would see a profit in their deaths.

ISIS obviously bears primary blame for all civilian deaths in Mosul. But a portion of that blame is shared by every journalist, “human rights” activist, politician and demonstrator who blamed Israel rather than Hamas for civilian deaths in Gaza–because they are the ones who persuaded ISIS that deliberately sacrificing civilians is an effective way to fight a war.