What Other State, Other than US and Israel Is Expected To Declare Their Plans

[Annie]

If this opinion of yours is true, why do you think that is?

A sort of response:

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson071006.html

July 10, 2006
The Israel Enigma
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

What explains most of the world's dislike of Israel ?

Since Israeli settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian terrorists have replied by consistently shooting homemade Qassam rockets at civilian targets inside Israel . Just recently, they've kidnapped a soldier and a hitchhiker (who has been killed) — and promised to do the same to others.

You'd expect these terrorist attacks on Israel to be viewed by responsible nations as similar to the jihadist violence we read about daily around the world — radical Islamists beheading Russian diplomats over Chechnya , plotting to do the same to the Canadian prime minister or threatening murder over insensitive Danish cartoons.

But that isn't the case at all. Israel is always seen as a special exception that somehow deserves what it gets.

Other states can retaliate with impunity, brutally killing thousands of Muslim terrorists, while Israel is condemned when it takes out a few dozen.

When in late 1999 Russians stormed Grozny , thousands of Chechnya Muslims died. Yet the press was mostly silent. Baathist Syria went after the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, wiping out much of the city of Hama and killing perhaps more than 10,000. Not many U.N. resolutions or international refugee efforts there.

To this day, no one knows the horrific body count from the Islamic insurrection in Algeria . Darfur finally earns occasional airtime, but only after tens of thousands have perished.

But Israel 's 2002 "siege" of the West Bank town Jenin, where less than 80 died on both sides, was evoked as "genocide" by those in the Middle East who often deny the real one that took 6 million Jewish lives. When Israel retaliates by air to terrorism, it is dubbed a "blitz" by the press — as if it were akin to the Nazis carpet-bombing London .

Israel 's border fence is referred to as a "Berlin Wall," but you never hear Egypt 's nearby massive concrete barrier to keep Palestinians in Gaza described that way.

Then there is the open sore of the West Bank "occupation." Even if you forget that a series of offensive wars to destroy Israel in part originated from Palestine, or that Israel has given up land acquired by war in its perennial hope for "land for peace," what is so unique about the West Bank that drowns out all other crises over contested ground (from islands like Cyprus and the Falklands to entire countries like Tibet)? Why has tiny Israel alone earned more U.N. resolutions of condemnation than all those offered against all other nations of the world combined?

It is not as if Israel is a rogue state. For over a half-century, it's been the only liberal democracy in the Middle East . Israeli scientists have given the world everything from innovative computer software to drip-irrigation technology.

Oil explains some of the weird discrepancy in how the world views certain countries. It warps policymaking. Take away Iranian and Arab petroleum — and thus the risk of another oil embargo or rigged price hike — and Western fears of Middle East oil states would diminish. Naked self-interest determines the foreign policy of most nations.

The size of Israel factors in here as well. Israel has a population of not much more than 6 million and is surrounded by nearly 350 million Muslim Arabs. Most of the world counts heads — and adjusts attitudes accordingly.

The old anti-Semitism is, of course, another ingredient that accounts for the animus shown Israel . Even sensitive, multicultural Westerners care little that Arab "allies" often portray Jews as "pigs" and "apes" in their state-run media. Odious tracts like "Mein Kampf" still sell briskly in Palestine , and Iranian and Gulf money subsidizes a mini-industry of holocaust denial.

Finally, as we know from our own southern border, anytime a successful Westernized nation is adjacent to a poorer Third World country, primordial emotions like honor and envy cloud reason. Rather than concede that Western-style democracy, capitalism, personal freedom and the rule of law explain why a prosperous, stable Israel arose from scrub and rock, Palestinians fixate on "Zionism," "colonialism" and "racism."

No wonder they do. Otherwise they would have to grapple with intractable and indigenous tribalism, gender apartheid, militias and religious fundamentalism, while building an open society based on the rule of law.

In some ways, Israel 's values and success most resemble the United States .

And that raises a final question: Is Israel hated by the world for supporting us — or are we hated for supporting it? Or is it both?

 

[dilloduck]

A sort of response:

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson071006.html

And that raises a final question: Is Israel hated by the world for supporting us — or are we hated for supporting it? Or is it both?

yup-that's my question!

 

[Annie]

yup-that's my question!

I guess one could go with the idea that 'no good deed ever goes unpunished.'

 

[dilloduck]

I guess one could go with the idea that 'no good deed ever goes unpunished.'

Anti-semitic thought arises because of the good deeds that Jews do?

 

[red states rule]

um hmmmmmmmm, uh lets see people who often bash jews on this board: rtwngavngr and William Joyce.

Both of whom are conservatives.

James Moran (D-VA) said Jews were the reason we are in Iraq

and we have this gem for the libs.........

http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/g...Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/03/10&ID=Ar00101
ISRAEL IS EYED IN BLAME GAME OVER IRAQ WAR

Rockefeller Sends Demand to Pentagon

By ELI LAKE Staff Reporter of the Sun



WASHINGTON — Senator Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is demanding to know how much information a small office in the Pentagon received from the Israeli government and how much information this office shared with the Israelis, according to correspondence obtained by The New York Sun.

While Mr. Rockefeller has demanded a broad range of information and documentation on coordination with Israel, he has asked no such question about the Pentagon’s coordination with other foreign governments, according to an administration official familiar with the details of the investigation.

Conspiracy theories that the Israeli government worked with hawks in the Bush administration to maneuver America to war against Iraq are a staple of fringe anti-war rhetoric on the extreme left and right, but officials here say Mr. Rockefeller’s letter marks one of the first times the accusation has been taken up seriously by a mainstream American political leader.

Democrats in this election season have seized on the broader matter of pre-war intelligence failures of the Bush administration.

As the Sun reported yesterday, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, has taken time out of his campaign schedule to write to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to request records on the Pentagon’s funding of the Iraqi National Congress.

The center of the Democratic effort to press this issue has been the Senate’s intelligence panel, which voted last month to expand significantly its investigation after three Republican senators threatened to vote with the panel’s Democrats.

Mr. Rockefeller’s questions in the October 1, 2003, letter to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith are part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the Office of Special Plans, an office about which Mr. Feith has said there has been “so much misinformation…that I would urge everybody to treat with great skepticism what you read on that subject.”

In a section of the October 1 letter to Mr. Feith headed “Coordination with the Israeli Government,” Mr. Rockefeller writes, “Have you or anyone in OSD received, in writing or orally, any terrorist-related assessments or intelligence from Prime Minister Sharon’s office or other elements of the Israeli government?”

Preceding this question, the senator cites an article by Robert Dreyfuss in the July 7, 2003, issue of the Nation magazine that “indicated that elements of your staff have been coordinating their terrorism assessments with a ‘rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.’”

The article cited by Mr. Rockefeller also said that this special unit may have been responsible for forging a document from the Niger foreign ministry regarding Iraqi attempts to procure Uranium yellowcake.

“The language in the Nation article was very charged and implies sinister motives on the part of the Israelis. I think the senator probably regrets using that same language in his letter of investigation,” Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat of New York, told the Sun yesterday.

Said a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now a Washington lawyer, Morris Amitay, “I can’t understand why the senator would single out Israel on the basis of a biased account in an Israel-bashing rag like The Nation. Why didn’t he ask for what information this unit received from other intelligence services from friendly countries? This is troubling,”

A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Richard Perle, said, “It is pathetic when the Senate intelligence committee relies on a left-wing screed in an ultra-left-wing publication by Robert Dreyfuss as a basis for its inquiries to the executive branch.” (Mr. Perle is a member of the board of Hollinger International, which owns a minority stake in the Sun.)

A spokesman for Mr. Rockefeller, Wendy Morigi, said the intelligence committee’s members “are going to look at all questions related to where intelligence was coming from.”

When asked whether Senator Rockefeller has queried Mr. Feith about coordinating intelligence assessments with foreign governments other than Israel’s, she said, “The committee investigation is ongoing.”

“I cannot talk about a committeesensitive letter,” she said.

Mr. Feith responded to the questions in a February 13 letter to Senator Rockefeller. “Members of my office and I speak frequently with representatives of many governments, including the government of Israel,” he wrote. “These exchanges occur through normal policy channels and we exchange views on questions involving terrorism.”

But Mr. Feith also said that to the best of his knowledge neither he nor his staff ever shared American assessments of weapons of mass destruction or terrorism with Israeli officials or private citizens. He noted that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld created a liaison office between the Israeli ministry of defense and the Pentagon in the weeks prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As for Mr. Rockefeller’s request for documents that describe Mr. Feith and his staff’s dealings with the Israelis, Mr. Feith wrote that the request “would require an inordinate amount of work to comply with.” He added that his office could produce these documents if “we could get a more precise understanding of what you are interested in.”

An Israeli official in Washington who would speak only on condition of anonymity said, “It should come as no surprise to anyone that Israel and the United States have a close relationship in the field of intelligence. This is part of the overall strategic relationship between the countries. This relationship is conducted between the professionals in our intelligence community and the professionals on the American side. That process, if it ever became politicized, would not be to Israel’s benefit or the benefit of the United States.”

Democrats investigating the pre-war Iraq intelligence have relied on numerous press reports as the basis of their inquiries.Yesterday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York, asked about recent news stories that suggested the Defense Intelligence Agency had found most of the information from Iraqi National Congress defectors before the war to be “useless or false.” In response, the DIA’s director, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, said, “That news report does not accurately reflect our opinion.”

 

[Annie]

I wonder if Sen. Rockefeller is going to out Ben Franklin's masonic ties to the American public?

http://www.belcherfoundation.org/trilateral_center.htm