The single most common interpretation of the results of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain was that Conservatism will now get some much-deserved time in the political wilderness, after voters overwhelmingly chose a center-Left platform over Conservative ideas.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And here's why.

Virtually every single time Conservative ideas were offered to voters, they responded with votes of confidence in them. For example, McCain -- who loves to poke Conservatives in the eye and kick their shins -- was behind by double digits in the polls in late August. He then picked a sharp Conservative who appealed especially to social Conservatives in Gov. Sarah Palin, and guess what? He got a double-digit swing in the polls in two weeks.

Late in the campaign, when Obama invaded Joe the Plumber's neighborhood, prompting the famous conversation on redistribution, McCain got some serious traction in the polls. Why? Because he had finally -- finally -- articulated a Conservative position on something. He talked plainly and powerfully about the relationship between taxes and economic growth, and how the Conservative way to address the economic crisis -- for example, incentivizing reinvestment, or protecting the growth potential of small businesses -- was what the moment called for. And he was rewarded by the voters, at least temporarily.

Then there was Prop 8 in California, and its clones in Arizona and Florida. Two of those were states that Obama won with high voter turnout, and that high turnout actually helped the passage of amendments that protect traditional marriage (minorities voted for the amendments in higher numbers than whites, at least in California).

Then there was New Jersey, where the governor/czar had two chances to further rape his loyal subjects and pillage their freedom of choice, and he lost both. Conservatives won on judge accountability and on public bond issues. In New Jersey.

In the days after the election, it became clear that McCain's lack of Conservative ideas contributed greatly to his loss, since Mitt Romney would quite obviously have handled the crisis better, as he has governed and managed successfully as a Conservative throughout his career in the public and private sectors (and the Olympics; I'm not sure if that's the public or private sector, maybe a little of both). Rudy Giuliani had better Conservative experience with, and plans for, entitlements than McCain, and Fred Thompson was light years ahead of McCain on Conservative legal issues.

Don't forget, most of the "moderate" Republicans, who told the Conservatives to shut up and back McCain once he won the nomination, were the ones who abandoned him and endorsed Obama.

In the last couple days, some of the McCain campaign staffers have complained about Palin, though much of what they've said has been demonstrably false (like the Africa issue). It has been petty, but it's a good example of the contempt the McCain campaign has had for Conservatives. No surprise that George W. Bush outperformed McCain in pretty much every demographic. For those looking to jettison Bush (like McCain), the people have spoken: We like coherent messages, loyalty, and a strong dose of Conservative wisdom. Even if Bush hasn't been Mr. Conservative in his second term, it's nice for Conservatives to see that a Republican turning on Bush wasn't a winning strategy.

In other words, neither party, and none of the major movements in this country, will shed a tear for McCain's loss. (Many individuals will shed a tear, and understandably so. But McCain wasn't part of any mainstream movement.) I admire John McCain more than I can say, for many reasons. But the McCain campaign should be wished a solid "good riddance" from this campaign. He won the Republican nomination on the backs of Democrats and Independents, and then returned the favor by shoving Conservatives under the Straight Talk Express. And now his former campaign staffers are trying to ruin the career of his Conservative veep.

So Conservatives shouldn't be saying: "What went wrong?" They should be saying: "We told you so."

Anyway, don't blame me, I voted for Romney.

Earlier this month, one could almost hear the wind faintly whispering a disapproving refrain from the ghost of Clarence K. Streit: "I told you so." He would have been looking at us, and pointing to Georgia.

In 1938, Streit published "Union Now," his call for a union of democracies, which would act as one nation under the principles of federalism. The point, he wrote in "Union Now," was this: "The best way to prevent war is to make attack hopeless."

A simple alliance wasn't up to the task, he warned, because the nationalist desire to avoid commitments and confrontations would also prevent allied nations from coming to each other's aid in time to stop a war. An alliance could help a nation win a war that has already begun, he wrote. "But it cannot promise, as Union can, to prevent the war -- and that is the main thing."

Georgia is an ally of the powerful West, and as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's nation was invaded by the Russian army, the West powerfully wagged its collective finger at Vladimir Putin.

While Streit's proposal for a federal union of democracies is unrealistic, especially when one takes a gander at the European Union, there is one example of a league of democracies that could prevent war against its member nations that has come once again to the forefront of the foreign policy debate: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

Earlier this year, President George W. Bush's continued and consistent pursuit of multilateralism took the form of pushing for NATO membership (or at least provisional membership, known as a membership action plan -- MAP) of Georgia, making the argument that we should stand by our allies, especially those that take the Soviet-sized risks that Georgia took to join our side.

Our European friends found Bush's sense of loyalty charming, but chose instead to continue the always game-changing policy of paying lip service to these democratic ideals and morals they're always hearing so much about.

So, Georgia (along with Ukraine) was denied even a MAP, and as Streit predicted, the alliance would come stomping in -- well after war was declared and much of the damage done.

I asked Karla Beth Jones, the Europe director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), based in Washington, D.C., if this has presented a defining moment for NATO.

She said it has, and she pointed to the Cold War as an example, echoing Streit's thesis.

"I think NATO's greatest value is as a deterrent organization," Jones told me. "Basically, we managed to win the Cold War without ever going to war, because NATO acted as a deterrence. And I believe Russia may not have provoked the Georgian attack if we had offered a MAP to both Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest. And that's why this is a defining moment for NATO, and for other coalitions."

Her point, essentially, is this: NATO works. Fredo Arias-King, the founder of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, told me that if there's one reason why Putin's aggression was a mistake, it's NATO.

"The sight of [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel by Saakashvili pledging to support Georgia's NATO bid is telling," Arias-King said.

He continued, "Probably Putin thought that he could conquer Tbilisi and carry out to the fullest the invasion, since then it would have made geostrategic sense. Regime change and installation of a quisling that would have forfeited Georgia's NATO aspirations, good government, and, most importantly, that Baku-Tbilisi-Çeyhan pipeline, which prevents Russia from monopolizing all the hydrocarbons from the area, was his semi-rational goal. However, this did not happen."

Arias-King said it reminded him of the failed August 1991 coup in Russia by the State Emergency Committee (GKChP). Invading a country without regime change, he said, was worse for Russia than if it had never intervened.

The conflict, Arias-King said, was "good for NATO."

"Several NATO countries had been echoing Moscow's argument that the alliance is out of date, anachronistic, and unnecessary in today's world," Arias-King explained. "But Russia's Soviet-like 19th-century tactics against a small neighbor have revived images of 1945, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1968, 1979, and 1980. It will be harder for Moscow's apologists inside NATO -- mainly Germany and France -- to make that case now."

Arias-King believes Moscow will fill any power vacuum in its neighborhood, and that Russia's actions hastened a standoff between Russia and the West that favors the West.

Why, I then asked Jones, would Russia lose such a standoff? Mainly economic factors, she said -- especially if Russia is expelled from the G8.

"Russia will have lost its standing in the world community," Jones said. "And it actually was building it back up again. People who weren't watching what Putin was doing internally were seeing Russia in a more positive light. But I think Russia is going to disintegrate internally and, just when it needs international help, it's not going to have it, because it will be an international pariah."

What's NATO's role in that scenario?

"NATO can protect Russia's near-abroad states until Russia disintegrates," Jones believes.

In other words, while the Bear starves, NATO will keep it from going fishing in Georgia and Ukraine.

Pardon my surprise, but this NATO stuff all sounds so... functional.

I was wondering why I seemed reflexively dubious of the efficacy of international coalitions, when the Jerusalem Post helped me out. "UNIFIL commander: Israel violating 1701" was the headline, with a story detailing how the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, via its commander Maj.-Gen. Claudio Graziano, was claiming that Israel had been unlawfully flying over southern Lebanon in violation of the resolution that ended the Second Lebanon War two years ago.

What Graziano was doing is called protecting your own interests. The U.N., as we have previously reported, has been assisting the terrorist organization Hezbollah in the latter's quest to embed its fighters and smuggle its weapons into south Lebanon. Israeli flyovers run the risk of exposing the fact that UNIFIL troops are merely Shiite militants in blue helmets.

I particularly liked this line from the Post story: "In contrast, [Graziano] said that the U.N. enjoyed excellent cooperation with Hezbollah and with the local Lebanese people."

I'll bet. In any event, Graziano tipped his hand eventually. "He conceded," the Post reported, "that his soldiers were not trying to prevent weapons smuggling from Syria as demanded by the U.N. [Security Council] because the Lebanese government had not requested such action." The Lebanese government, by the way, includes Hezbollah.

So, if the United Nations is a model for how not to behave unless you're on the payroll of the world's most dangerous and ruthless terrorist organization, is NATO the polar opposite?

"I believe it's the optimal model," Jones told me. "I believe that NATO is the most functional of all the multilateral organizations. And I would welcome more multilateral organizations like NATO."

I asked Jones how likely it is that Georgia and Ukraine will now be admitted to NATO, Ukraine being scheduled for such a vote in December.

"I am cautiously optimistic," she said.

Arias-King, whose journal predicted Putin's invasion of Georgia, agrees.

"At the December summit, there is a bigger chance that they will be offered either a MAP or some new invention that falls just short of a MAP," Arias-King said. "However, that process will take a while. But it's a better chance now than was the case before the invasion of Georgia."

Perhaps it's helpful to look at this through the prism so eloquently described by historian and political science professor David C. Hendrickson. In the winter 1997 issue of The National Interest, Hendrickson criticized the limited scope of the debate on interventionism. It is not, he said, a choice between isolationism and universalism; instead, the idea behind the federal union inhabits a middle ground.

"It enables us to distinguish between the construction of a security community in Europe -- part of the civic union to which we belong -- and the commitment to a universalistic doctrine of collective security that would oblige us to intervene anywhere and everywhere," Hendrickson wrote. "It lights up a path equidistant from the isolationist and the imperial temptations, rejecting the simple-minded notion that we must choose between these equally disagreeable alternatives."

But aren't we so different from the ethnic South Ossetians with which we claim to sympathize? So what, Hendrickson says.

"If we recall that one of the purposes associated with federative systems is not to submerge everything in a bland homogeneity but rather to affirm both individuality and commonality -- to come together in order to stay apart -- the civilizational differences that separate a Turkey or Japan from the West should not constitute insuperable obstacles to effective cooperation," he wrote.

Hendrickson's point about belonging to a "civic union" with the democratic European states is just as true and possibly more significant today than when he wrote those words 11 years ago. With our membership to that civic union comes civic responsibilities, and we owe Georgia and Ukraine their reward for turning their backs on totalitarian communism and joining our league of democracies.

In fact, just ask the Georgian people. Journalist Michael Totten, working on a piece for City Journal, interviewed a woman in Tbilisi named Lia, who said that her husband had recently arrived to join them in a school classroom -- their new temporary home, along with six other families. As her husband passed the Russian soldiers outside the city and headed toward Georgian territory, the Russians asked him, "Are you going to the American side?"

Totten's Georgian translator credited the U.S. with the fact that the Georgian capital was kept out of Russian hands. "The night they came close to Tbilisi," she told Totten, "Bush and McCain made their strongest speeches yet. The Russians seemed to back down. Bush and McCain have been very good for us."

As for the Bear, Arias-King says it's good for Russia to know her limits. Is it good for Russians, I asked him, or just good for Russia?

He clarified that it sends a much-needed (and hopefully heeded) signal to Putin and his buddies.

"The Russian people, as usual, are passive objects in this game of his," he said. "They suffer the consequences of the faux grandeur emanating from their elites."

Let's make sure the Georgian people don't suffer anymore from Putin's adventures. They belong in NATO, now.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State, where this column first appeared.

The Israeli deputy consul general could not, for all his humble sagacity, see the future.

Yet Benjamin Krasna’s heart was heavy. It was June 28, 2006 — two weeks before Israel and the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah would fight a bitter, monthlong war in which Hezbollah would succeed in causing the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians in addition to the Israeli casualties of the war. But as he spoke that night to the Jewish Federation of Ocean County, there was still some hope that 18-year-old Itamar resident Eliyahu Asheri was alive. Asheri had been kidnapped by Palestinians earlier that week, and his body would be found only hours after Krasna’s speech.

When asked about Asheri, Krasna said he wanted to make one thing clear: “He is an Israeli,” Krasna said. We don’t, he continued, perform the crass act of pretending to better understand Asheri’s kidnapping in light of the fact that Itamar is a Jewish village near Shechem — a “settlement.”

Krasna was clearly irritated by the media’s portrayal of Asheri as a “settler” — as if that made his kidnapping OK.

Two years later, on July 3, 2008, a Palestinian terrorist would drive a bulldozer over Jewish pedestrians and motorists in Jerusalem, killing three and wounding more than 60. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, via its columnist Bradley Burston, was in utter disbelief at the savagery of “the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end the occupation. Jews.”

The ideologues behind Haaretz, who have admitted to covering up corruption and last year told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel has to be “raped” into making concessions for peace, were aghast. Where, they wanted to know, have all the good terrorists gone? You know, the ones with the decency to target settlers and occupiers and soldiers. Why target Jews unaffiliated with Israel’s settlements?  

On July 7, almost 100 Israel Defense Forces reservists from the Rabbinate Corps were called up to active duty for the purpose of exhuming bodies of foreign fighters that are to be returned to Hezbollah as part of a prisoner swap. Hezbollah will receive hundreds of prisoners and bodies, as well as Samir Kuntar, who is currently serving consecutive life sentences in Israel for his murder of Einat Haran. Einat was 4 years old when Kuntar smashed her head repeatedly against a rock with the butt of his rifle until he crushed her skull, next to the lifeless body of the girl’s father, Danny Haran, who Kuntar had executed moments before in order that Einat’s last sight would be the murder of her father.

It is doubtful that there is any air on this planet more wasted than that which circles Kuntar’s lungs, giving life to someone who exists only for death.

Yet he will be free, and he will kill again. And in return, Israel will receive the bodies of two of the IDF’s fallen heroes, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping by Kuntar’s masters touched off the war.

Goldwasser and Regev were taken from within Israel’s borders. But to the purveyors of self-hating collaboration such as Haaretz, are they still tools of the “occupation”? Upon their return, as the worldwide Jewish community cries for its sons of Israel, mourns for its two faithful servants of God and country, sees the tragic end of a story that compelled it to say Tehillim every day for two years, feels the weight of failed hope and fights the onset of hope’s loss: what will we think?

To those of us who watched Goldwasser’s wife and mother plead for his return last year in New York, standing across the street from that nest of corruption, that cathedral of depravity known as the United Nations building, we will think simply that we have lost two of our own. There are no categories; there is no caveat — regardless of on which part of biblical Israel they stood when they were taken from us.

After all, international law unequivocally sides with us on this one. Ex iniuria non oritur ius. An illegal act cannot produce a legal result, roughly translated. That’s the principle of international law that removes any recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. An illegal act (Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank from 1948-67) cannot produce a legal result (accepted claim of sovereignty over that land by Jordan and the Jordanians now living there as a result, known as West Bank Palestinians).

Additionally, it is not disputed that Jordan shelled Israel before any Israeli guns were aimed at Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, so the West Bank was land that Israel won in a defensive conflict. International law, as scholar Julius Stone wrote, considers Israel’s actions perfectly lawful — an obvious but important edict.

International law, he wrote in International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, “does not so forbid [taking land], in particular, when the force is used to stop an aggressor, for the effect of such prohibition would be to guarantee to all potential aggressors that, even if their aggression failed, all territory lost in the attempt would be automatically returned to them. Such a rule would be absurd to the point of lunacy. There is no such rule.”

Which means Haaretz, the New York Times, et al. are wrong about Asheri and his fellow Itamar residents. They’re Israelis. And so are the Jews in the oldest Jewish community in the world, Hebron. And the tumultuous modern history of Jews in and around Shechem (now home mostly to a large Palestinian settlement called Nablus) makes them no less Israeli. Same goes for the flourishing Jewish community in Ariel, which is separated from Jerusalem by random Palestinian settlements along the way but is of great value to the state and the Jewish people.

And what about Jerusalemites? They’re Israeli, too! Despite this, in January, just before President George W. Bush was to visit Israel, Condoleezza Rice admonished Israel over a planned housing complex in Jerusalem called Har Homa. “Har Homa,” Rice carped, “is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning.” The very beginning of what? On July 16, 1997, the U.N. voted to criticize the housing project. The United States voted against that resolution.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) offers the reasons why then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson voted with the Israelis, instead of voting against them or even simply abstaining. First, the land is 1,850 dunams, about 460 acres, which the Israeli government acquired via eminent domain, and 1,400 of the 1,850 dunams were owned by Jews. Much of that land was owned by Jews prior to 1948. Every single dunam of the entire planned housing project is currently vacant — not a single home would have to be knocked down nor anyone displaced.

Additionally, in the Oslo Accords, Jerusalem is specifically separated from settlements: “1. ... the jurisdiction of the Council will cover West Bank and Gaza Strip territory as a single territorial unit, except for: a. issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, ... (Interim Agreement, Article XVII).” Building in Jerusalem is not only a feature of the final status agreements (not the interim agreements or Declaration of Principles), but it is also a distinct feature from settlements.

Fortunately Rice, whose strange ruling on Har Homa contradicts Bush’s opinion on the matter, managed to defuse the situation when she couldn’t even answer questions about building in Jerusalem. For example, reporters asked her, do you consider other Jewish neighborhoods outside the Green Line, such as Gilo and Ramot, to be “settlements?”

“The important point here is that one reason that we need to have an agreement is so that we can stop having this discussion about what belongs to Israel and what doesn’t,” she responded.

In other words, she has no idea.

But the answer is that while Jerusalem has the greatest significance for Jews and the Jewish state, Jews have every right, as Israelis, to live in the West Bank, and the brave men and women of the IDF have every right to defend them. Terrorism against Jews in the West Bank is murder, and it cannot be justified or explained away any more than the Mercaz Harav massacre in Jerusalem in March. The Palestinians want Tel Aviv as much as they want Ariel or Hebron or Beersheba, and they want West Jerusalem cleared of Jews, too. That, Mr. Burston, is what Husam Taysir Dwayat, the 30-year-old driver of the bulldozer and resident of a southeast Jerusalem neighborhood, was doing.

Walid Shoebat, the former PLO terrorist turned Israeli advocate once said: “There are only two choices when it comes to terrorism. The first is to make excuses for it. The second is to say there is absolutely no excuse for it. There is no third choice.”

Settler, soldier, secular, or scholar, the second choice should always be our first response.


{This column first appeared in the July 18, 2008 issue of The Jewish State.}

It was a poignant moment -- at once a fond farewell and a vow of friendship, of love, of loyalty, and of honor.

And after declaring that "Masada shall never fall again," and just before stating that when confronting terrorism, Israel -- a country of 7 million -- is "307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you," President George W. Bush warned against "the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred."

Barely had the words received their deserving ovation from the Knesset when a Web site here in the U.S. blared on its home page "That's offensive, Mr. President".

But it wasn't an anti-Bush political blog. Nor was it a news site often critical of the president.

It was the Web site of the new self-proclaimed "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement," J Street. J Street, as we profiled in a recent edition of The Jewish State, is the Israel lobby cooked up and headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, former President Bill Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser and the policy director for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Billed as an answer to AIPAC, J Street has tipped its hand far too early; promising to rescue U.S. Israel policy from the "neocons," and attacking Israel's most stalwart American ally, J Street confirmed fears that it is not so much pro-Israel as it is firmly entrenched in a political crusade.

This has presented a veritable beehive of problems. First, those involved with J Street have, as Alan Solomont -- a Democratic Party fundraiser who is involved with J Street -- told the Washington Post, "We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard."

Of course that's not true -- as a Gallop poll noted in March, Israel receives a favorable rating from 84 percent of self-identified Republicans and 64 percent from Democrats, so it's doubtful that those "right-of-center" are distorting the mainstream view in which Israel gets pretty high marks across the board. But that misses the point anyway; the term "neocon" is mostly used as a pejorative for the high-level Jews in Bush's cabinet, often depicted as a sinister cabal of Jewish agents pushing our country into war with Iran.

That a Jewish lobby would use a smear term aimed primarily at Jews is evidence of the partisan thinking of J Street. It's a colossal mistake.

But not as colossal a mistake as, say, donating money to individual campaigns and endorsing a candidate in a presidential election -- which, unfortunately, J Street aims to do as well, via JStreetPAC.

According to the Washington Post: "The initial efforts will be relatively modest: Ben-Ami said the group aims to try to raise at least $50,000 or more for a handful of campaigns this fall as a 'test case.' But the group intends to raise its profile in future campaign cycles, and some major liberal fundraisers have already committed to the venture, including Solomont, high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo, and former New York City corporation counsel Victor Kovner, a supporter of Clinton's presidential bid."

That, the Post notes, is "something AIPAC does not do."

What does Ben-Ami think will happen if and when they throw money and influence behind one candidate (and publicly endorse that candidate) and the other candidate wins? Both political parties, and all presidential candidates, must believe that the Jewish community is interested in promoting Jewish causes, not political parties. And they must be made to believe that they would have the support of the Jewish community.

Jewish organizations looking to support Jewish causes -- including Israel -- first and foremost should never align themselves with one political party and against the other.

Another question raised by J Street is whether the lobby is more pro-peace or pro-Israel? Let's take a look at J Street's stance on the issues, available on its Web site.

Settlements: "Israel's settlements in the occupied territories have, for over forty years, been an obstacle to peace. They have drained Israel's economy, military, and democracy and eroded the country's ability to uphold the rule of law," reads the site.

I believe the appropriate agenbite for that would be gobbledygook. Overall, it's nothing but empty rhetoric copied and pasted from Arab talking points.

On Iran, J Street is even more troubling. Claiming that current policy of "saber-rattling, threats and sanctions has neither resolved the nuclear issue nor changed Iranian behavior," J Street advocates "high-level negotiations".

Here's the cringe-inducing part: "The informal Iranian negotiating proposal of 2003" should be the model. The problem is, that proposal was a hoax. Debunked quite clearly by Michael Rubin, who at the time of the supposed "offer" was Defense Department Iran country director, the document had a number of red flags that betrayed its spuriousness. Nevertheless, much of the press corps ate it up as an opportunity to smack Bush over the head for his "rejection" of the "offer."

Rubin revealed that the "offer" was the work of disgruntled Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann, who was replaced after the ruse came to light. Guldimann developed the document with Sadeq Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador in Paris.

In an online debate hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in April/May 2007, Rubin said, "The 2003 Iranian offer is bogus. Washington and Tehran were already talking in Geneva, although Tehran broke the commitments it made there. That was the channel, not an unsigned English fax. Even the Swiss foreign ministry acknowledges privately that Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador, was freelancing. Nor do serious proposals come with the caveat that the issuing party only agrees with 80 percent of its own paper."

Regarding that document, Rubin later sounded a warning note on National Review Online in May 2007 that J Street's founders should have kept in mind: "It is dangerous and irresponsible to create a false baseline that validates concessions never offered."

And here's J Street's official opinion of the war in Iraq (emphasis added): "The Iraq war is a prime example of the mistaken course charted by the Bush Administration in the Middle East and beyond since September 11," the Web site states. "Not only are both the United States and Israel less secure, but al-Qaeda has strengthened and expanded its reach, not only into Iraq, but into Jordan and the Egyptian Sinai as well."

I'm not sure what J Street bases that all on, but the facts strongly dispute their statements on American and Israeli security and al-Qaeda's strength. The rest is more partisan pettiness.

It all starts to make sense, however, when you take a look at the organization's financial backers, which include Moveon.org, the George Soros-funded organization behind the New York Times ad calling General David Petraeus "General Betray Us."

Moveon.org is also the Web site on which the phrase "Jew Lieberman Done" was trumpeted after the organization helped Ned Lamont defeat Senator Joe Lieberman in their 2006 Senate primary election. ("Jew Lieberman" was not done, it turned out, as Lieberman ran in the general election as an independent and won.)

Some other Moveon.org classics from its now defunct Action Forum: "Anyone who takes the time to become familiar with the history of the creation of, and the acts of the Jewish State of Israel can come to no other conclusion that it should not exist where it does in the first place"; "Israel should have never been recognized to create a state as a result of terrorist acts"; and "Islamic hostilities will go away the minute Israel is closed down and the Jews all move to the U.S. where they should have come to begin with."

J Street has not hidden its partisan nature; rather, it has proudly boasted of it. Part of this stems from a profound misunderstanding of Right and Left with regard to Israel. The Right in Israel is not the same as the Right in the U.S., though of course there are similarities. Ditto with the Left. For example, Golda Meir was considered a leftist (and indeed lived among the nascent Israel's socialist kibbutz culture) yet eschewed the Left's feminist identity politics for a more Conservative approach to modesty and merit.

Such misunderstanding, however, is actually J Street's clarion call to American activists and media. And that call was answered by New Yorker senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg. In a blog on the magazine's Web site, Hertzberg spoke of the "glad tiding" of J Street's founding, offering a case study in the outstanding ignorance that fueled the birth of the organization.

"True, there has been no shortage of lobbyists who assume that Israel's interests ought to be subsumed to those of West Bank settlers, defined by Likud-style neoconservatives, or yoked to those of lunatic American fundamentalists eager for a Levantine apocalypse featuring the mass slaughter of Jews who decline to convert to Christianity," Hertzberg wrote (again, emphasis ours). "But there has been a paucity of pro-Israel lobbyists who are also pro-peace, pro-liberal-democracy, and pro-secular, and who can deploy some political muscle besides. J Street aims to fill that gap. It isn't aiming to be the anti-AIPAC, exactly. There will be some overlap. But J Street won't be another holiday camp for neocon armchair warlords and Christianist rapture-mongers."

As of this writing, J Street's home page calls on Lieberman to withdraw his scheduled speech at an upcoming Israel Summit hosted by Christians United for Israel. On that note, Lieberman's recent keynote speech at the annual Commentary Fund dinner is instructive.

"By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy -- not bin Laden, but Bush -- [pacifist] activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years," Lieberman -- still a Democrat -- said, with a heavy heart, before imploring the audience to hold on dearly to knowledge that has slipped from the fingers of many Americans: "the difference between America's friends and America's enemies."

That's remarkable clarity from someone J Street's supporters might consider a neocon armchair warlord rapture-mongering Likud-style lunatic American fundamentalist.

En route to justice and peace, J Street is a dead end.

{This first appeared in the June 6, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}

Though "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem..." has become a near-ubiquitous reference point for discussions about the Israeli capital, there is another Psalm that rings poignant with an upcoming ignominious anniversary.

"Behold, your foes are in an uproar, and those who hate you have raised their head," warns Psalm 83. "They said, 'Come, let us cut them off from nationhood, so that the name of Israel will not be remembered any longer'."

May 31 should be the ninth anniversary of the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem; instead, it will mark the ninth anniversary of nothingness carefully constructed, lies carefully crafted, and failures shamefully abetted.

It will mark nine years since Senators Bob Dole, Jon Kyl, and Joseph Lieberman saw insulting proof that they had overestimated Jewish support for recognition of Jerusalem's Israeli sovereignty.

The Psalm quoted above does not mention Jerusalem, but rather "nationhood," and we should never hesitate to equate the two. Because on Passover, we do not say "next year in Tel Aviv"; after the '67 war, we did not sing "Ramat Gan of gold"; we do not celebrate Yom Herzliya Pituach.

We should revere every Israeli city as hallowed ground. But Jerusalem, whether under Israeli sovereignty or not, should be treated as the beating heart among the organs of Jewish unity.

The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, sponsored by Dole and passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress, states, among other provisions, that Jerusalem is the "capital of the State of Israel" and "the spiritual center of Judaism". It also declared that by mid-1999, the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv should be complete.

After the BBC last year apologized for calling Jerusalem Israel's capital, I asked Alan Dershowitz if there were some provision in international law regulating a state's designation of its capital that perhaps I didn't know about.

Dershowitz smiled at the absurdity that news outlets like the BBC required my question to be anything other than rhetorical. He told me that any nation may set its own capital, and to deny such basic rights to Israel was the uncivil union of hypocrisy and anti-Zionism.

So, if Jerusalem is Israel's capital, and the Embassy Act states that "Each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own capital", then what's the problem? It's the escape clause, called the Presidential Waiver, which states that the president may suspend the action for six months if he believes it will "protect the national security interests of the United States."

Former President Bill Clinton and current President George Bush have both used the waiver every six months. Clinton, having promised to review the situation after Camp David, presumably put his intention to move the embassy in the same pile as his promise to commute Jonathan Pollard's sentence. Bush's hands-off approach to the peace process, often for the better, unfortunately seems to include keeping his hands off the embassy.

But to blame only Clinton and Bush would be a mistake. The Israeli government has routinely undermined efforts to move the embassy, afraid it will upset their Palestinian negotiating partners. In 1995, then-Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni told the New York Times that American congressional support for moving the embassy to Jerusalem "has a smell of provocation." Charming.

The powerhouse American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) admitted that it officially opposed such a bill, but once the bill was drafted and voted on, former AIPAC head Neal Sher said AIPAC was "boxed-in" and forced to support it. At the time of the bill's floor vote, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations did not take a position on the bill, and refused to endorse an earlier version of it. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) took a strong stance supporting the bill, but its pleas failed to inspire even an echo.

The Times picked up on that lead and ran with it; Times columnist Thomas Friedman accused Kyl and Lieberman of "exploit[ing] the issue for Jewish votes."

Other news organizations carried that mantle. CNN, in its news story about Bush promising to move the embassy in 2000, explained snidely that "Jerusalem is claimed as its new capital by Israel". Washington Post columnist Richard "Israel itself is a mistake" Cohen wrote that moving the embassy would only "win points wherever Dole gathers campaign funds" since Jerusalem's "political status is disputed" -- though the embassy would be in undisputedly Israeli west Jerusalem.

"Tel Aviv is charmless. For the time being, though, it will have to do," Cohen declared.

One ally in the media was Times columnist William Safire. Safire had no patience for the "national security" waiver, since, as he wrote in July 1996, Clinton had presented no national security threat. Instead, Clinton's spokesman stated that the waiver was being exercised "to ensure that no steps are taken that could be interpreted as pre-empting the negotiating process."

Safire fired back that such an "excuse for delay is nowhere in the law". For that matter, Safire said, the substance of the argument was based on a false premise anyway -- that peace negotiations would be upset. He quoted Lieberman as pointing out that in any final status agreement, part of Jerusalem would be Israeli.

"Our site would be on Israeli land," Lieberman said, infusing the discussion with a refreshing dose of logic and fair play. "Let peace negotiations proceed and let the U.S. law be carried out."

Lieberman wasn't alone. A year earlier, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich marveled at the opposition to what he thought was patently obvious.

"I think it is absurd for us to single out Israel as a country where we define what we think the capital should be," Gingrich told Israeli media in 1995.

Thus, the desire to move the embassy was bi-partisan -- even at the N.Y. Times! So what held it up? Safire pulled no punches.

"In Jerusalem's 3,000th year, Israel's new Government is eager for America's acknowledgment of its capital," Safire wrote in 1996. "Plain justice and the new realism demand it. The last obstacle is Mr. Clinton's reluctance to obey the law."

And that reluctance to obey the law has been passed down. It, too, has become bi-partisan, and a tradition in the Oval Office.

But maybe it really was a national security issue. The vehemently anti-Israel Middle East International warned of, in an editorial during the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election campaign, what amounted to thinly veiled threats of retaliation in the Arab world should the embassy be moved to Jerusalem.

"The reaction to the move in Muslim countries would be catastrophic," the editors wrote. "It is easy to imagine the attacks on American embassies, the rupture of diplomatic relations, and all the rest that would follow."

"All the rest" is a diplomatic way of putting it, but I think the message gets through.

The editors did, however, manage to stumble upon what unfortunately has been confirmed in the almost-quarter century since.

"Supporting the move to Jerusalem," the editors wrote, "is one of those easy gestures, "like being in favor of a united Ireland, or approving of motherhood and disapproving of sin, which cost the maker of them nothing."

In 1995, Senator John McCain co-sponsored the bill, and during her 2000 Senate run Hillary Clinton said she supported moving the embassy ASAP. When I asked McCain's campaign what his official position is on the issue, a spokeswoman reiterated that McCain co-sponsored and voted for the original legislation. McCain was in Jerusalem in March of this year and stated unequivocally that it is Israel's capital; would he commit to moving the embassy there? His campaign wouldn't get that specific with me.

A Clinton staffer, before setting off on the hunt for the campaign's official stance, told me she had just been to Jerusalem less than a year ago and remembered visiting the U.S. Consulate General there -- a reminder that there is at least some form of official recognition in the holy city. Senator Barack Obama has yet to respond to my query in any form.

So, is that it for moving the embassy? Will politicians no longer be cavalier about tossing out that promise?

They may not feel they need to make the promise anymore, and that's probably a good thing. But what about us? Can we so easily be absolved of our role in letting the issue fade?

Lieberman once exclaimed that, if need be, he and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott would move the embassy to Jerusalem "ourselves, brick by brick!" Yet, when the mouthpieces of the American Jewish community picked up their shovels, it was to facilitate the issue's burial.

After a nearly 2,000-year struggle to reclaim it, Jerusalem shouldn't be taken so lightly. And on May 31, it shouldn't be forgotten.

(Originally published in the May 23, 2008 edition of The Jewish State.)

(Author's note: This was originally published in the April 11 edition of The Jewish State)

The government is lying about who shot JFK. The government is lying about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government is lying about Pearl Harbor. The government is lying about 9/11.

 

Not sure if he's covered the moon landing, but former Princeton professor Richard Falk thinks the government is lying to you about the above formative historical events. According to Falk, the government has also been lying about Yasser Arafat being a terrorist, and, as he said in April 2002, "we should at least be clear that [Ariel] Sharon is a much bigger obstacle to real peace than Arafat is or ever was."

 

Falk's hard work has paid off; on March 26, he was appointed "special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

 

This newspaper offered a less than glowing appraisal of the efforts of Falk's predecessor, John Dugard, in a recent issue. As I am not especially given to "piling on," the U.N. would have to have appointed someone so clearly possessed of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist conspiracy theories to replace Dugard in order to provoke an immediate response on these pages.

 

True to form, they did.

 

Last year, Falk set out to pad his resume with something that would put him a step ahead of the competition for the U.N. job -- the privilege of consuming American and other Western taxpayer dollars while sowing the seeds of U.N.-subsidized anti-Semitism. What he came up with was an essay he authored called "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," in which he compared the Israeli government to the Nazis.

 

"There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species," Falk opens the essay.

 

He then goes on to explain just how gruesome and barbaric the Holocaust was, to make sure the reader understands to what he is about to compare Ehud Olmert's government.

 

"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not," Falk writes. "The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing" -- the Nazis were disturbing, but the Jews are especially disturbing -- "because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty."

 

Falk laments how the world watched silently as the 1994 Rwandan genocide took place, as the 1995 Bosnian genocide happened, and again as the genocide unfolded in Darfur.

 

Though some two million people in the Darfur region of Sudan have been displaced and 450,000 have been killed since the atrocities began in 2003, "Gaza is morally far worse," Falk states.

 

"It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza," he writes.

 

And just to put it in perspective, Falk offers: "It is helpful to recall that the liberal democracies of Europe paid homage to Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games, and then turned away tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany."

 

Falk has left a paper trail of his journey from obscurity to subversive critic of Israel and the U.S. Unfortunately, that trail -- made up of columns contributed to various newspapers and magazines -- reveals a person who is at his best moments confused, and at his worst moments much, much worse.

 

For example, Falk displays an intriguing lack of knowledge about the targets of his invective in a January 2002 essay titled "Appraising the war against Afghanistan". He criticizes the administration of President George W. Bush for too broadly extending the brand of "terrorist" to include "groups" like Hamas and Hezbollah.

 

"These latter groups have neither ideologically nor tactically associated themselves with al-Qaeda and the visionary outlook of Osama bin Laden, and their struggles are much harder to categorize," he writes.

 

Yet, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have worked together, especially thanks to the late Imad Mugniyeh, who trained bin Laden. Not only is Hezbollah ideologically and tactically associated with al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda actually modeled itself after Hezbollah -- it was a clone of the organization, or close to it.

 

He admits that Hamas has used "gruesome terrorist tactics" against Israeli civilians, but "the context has been one in which Israel has also used even more destructive tactics against Palestinian civilian society". More destructive and gruesome than suicide bombers and the kidnapping and torture of civilians -- both embraced by Hamas? We'll never know, because Falk doesn't give any examples.

 

He then states that Hamas and Hezbollah should be left intact, because to destroy them would deny the Palestinians their right to self-determination, and "should such groups be destroyed the effect would be to stabilize an oppressive Israeli occupation."

 

This is a point on which Falk has shed some valuable light, however. In a 2006 column he wrote for the Topeka Capital-Journal, Falk calls on the U.S. and Israel to engage in dialogue with Hamas. He complains that the U.S. and Europe insist on freezing Hamas out of the discussion "unless its leaders explicitly renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, accept all prior agreements between the Palestinians and Israel, and annul that part of the Hamas charter that calls for Israel's destruction."

 

This is unreasonable, he declares, because such devotion to terrorism and Israel's destruction is part of the genetic makeup of Hamas-led Palestinians. Take that away, and there's nothing left of Hamas.

 

"The chance of Hamas meeting these political conditions all at once is essentially nil since they amount to a renunciation of struggle and almost a declaration of surrender," he writes.

 

In other words, it's like telling the sun not to shine.

 

And the sun isn't shining, apparently, in the wilderness in which Falk wanders. He gives this away in his prescription for peace, published in The Nation in April 2002. Since only the Palestinians' violence is designated as terrorism, he writes, "Israel's greater violence" gets off scot-free.

 

"The point here is not in any way to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers and other violence against civilians, but to suggest that when a struggle over territory and statehood is being waged it can and should be resolved at the earliest possible point by negotiation and diplomacy, and that the violence on both sides tends toward the morally and legally impermissible," Falk writes.

 

To the casual observer living in the United Kingdom (or Waziristan, for that matter), that comment may seem erudite and reasonable -- a given. But in fact, as we know, the conflict is not about land or statehood, since the Palestinians have repeatedly refused any offer of land or statehood that wasn't prefaced by "From the river to the sea...."

 

Falk also wrote that the contention that Arafat resorted to terrorism is "seriously misleading." In fact, Falk writes, Arafat was the "moderate voice," dramatically fighting to protect Israeli civilians from attempted Palestinian terrorism; anyway, it was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount "that started the second intifada."

 

Wild-eyed conspiracy theorists are usually interesting -- from a distance. But Falk doesn't keep his distance from such people, rather he keeps their company.

 

One of those characters is David Ray Griffin, who wrote a book called "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11". Though the book is a reinvention of the wheel, its sales riding the wave of earlier 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it was very important to Falk that this book be published. Falk helped find a publisher for it, and wrote the introduction to the book as well.

 

"As with Pearl Harbor there are ample reasons to receive news of massive attack with some skepticism," Falk writes in the introduction. "As with the difficulties of the Roosevelt presidency in rallying the country for war, here too, the neocon advisers shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration had been frustrated by their inability to mobilize the country for war. These prominent advisors had made no secret of their fervent wish for some sort of hostile attack of dramatic magnitude that would awaken the American people to their sense of the dangers of the post-cold war world, as well as of the opportunities for global domination, a vision of global empire that was openly embraced by neocon leading lights."

 

Falk accuses the media of ignoring the evidence, and the American public of resisting the truth. He explains that in Europe, clear-thinking people were immediately proposing "official complicity" in the attacks, but for some reason Americans just didn't get it. Of course, the "neocon leading lights" were primarily Jewish, pro-Israel advisors, so it's unclear if Zionist brainwashing was the cause of the public's ardent support for its country, its military, and its president immediately following 9/11.

 

It shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that Falk didn't face much competition; according to U.N. Watch, the Islamic and Arab states pressured the council leadership to list only Falk as a nominee for the post.

 

This is the new, "reformed" U.N. human rights body. It calls to mind what former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said about the U.N.'s efforts to build a new rights council from the same broken pieces and using the same shoddy workmanship as the last.

 

"We want a butterfly," Bolton said. "We don't intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success."

{This column was first printed in the March 28, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}

If we never successfully figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg, is it proper to assign blame to either one for the sins of both?

Many of us have, with the best of intentions, done just that, as we hold on to some receding ray of hope for peace in Israel.

We will routinely say, "It's the leadership that's the problem with the Palestinians, not the people." It's a noble tack, I admit, but do we really know which came first, the Palestinian leaders or the Palestinians? Do the Palestinians get the leaders they want, or do the leaders get the Palestinians they want?

That question appeared to be answered by the election of the Islamist Iranian satellite Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel, by the Palestinian people in January 2006.

But then people said, "Well, Fatah was corrupt, and the election was a vote against corruption, not a mandate for perpetual war."

Such apologia have been far more difficult to find since the March 17 release of the new survey conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR).

The survey, titled "Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 27," finds that the "moderate" Fatah government led by Mahmoud Abbas and Western darling Salam Fayyad endured a sharp drop in public support in the West Bank and Gaza, while Hamas, led by Ismail Haniyeh, has won over another 10 percent of the Palestinian population.

And it's not just a superficial yea-or-nay vote, either. The pollsters found that not only is the Hamas leadership more "popular," but the Palestinian public has offered more support for Hamas's positions and policies, as well as its legitimacy.

Most politicians love focus groups and opinion polls because the polls basically tell them what to do. So, reading the polls, how does a politician or party gain the favor of the Palestinian "street"?

"These changes might have been the result of several political developments," according to the survey's Main Findings, "starting with the breaching of the Rafah border with Egypt during the last week of January and first week of February, followed by the Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip leading to a large number of Palestinian causalities and an increase in the number of rockets launched from the Gaza Strip against Israeli towns such as Sderot and Ashkelon, the two suicide attacks in Dimona and Jerusalem leading to the death of nine Israelis, and ending with the failure of the Annapolis process in positively affecting daily life of Palestinians in the West Bank, in stopping Israeli settlement activities, or in producing progress in final status negotiations."

In other words, what floats the average Palestinian's boat? Bombing a border wall with Egypt, launching rockets at innocent Israelis, suicide bombing Israeli towns, and shooting up a yeshiva library while killing as many inside as possible.

What are some of the average Palestinian's pet peeves? Prolonged exposure to peace negotiations and Jewish villages.

For a while, Fatah held a sizeable advantage in head-to-head polls with Hamas, if new parliamentary elections were to be held immediately. No mas.

The survey finds that the gap has narrowed from 18 percent to seven, putting Fatah up only 42 percent to 35 percent. In December, it was 49 percent to 31 percent.

Eleven percent remain undecided in both polls. That would be the "swing" vote, perhaps waiting to see how many dead Jews each party is willing to offer for their vote.

Another bad omen for Fatah is that it is slightly more popular in Gaza than it is in the West Bank.

In December, polls showed Abbas would beat Haniyeh in a presidential election 56 percent to 37 percent. The new survey shows that Haniyeh would win a nail-biter if elections were held today, 47 percent to 46. (Haniyeh shouldn't get too excited; he loses badly in a head-to-head matchup with jailed intifada veteran and renowned Jew-killer Marwan Barghouti, 57 percent to 38.)

The other findings are similar — the legitimacy of the governments, the favorable-unfavorable ratings of each administration, approval rating comparisons, etc. In fact, although Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 is still rejected across the board, the Palestinians have moved away from blaming Hamas for their actions.

"The tendency to avoid blaming Hamas alone for the continuation of the split reflects a change in public perception regarding the positions of the two factions regarding return to dialogue as an exit from the current crisis," the findings state. "Support for Fatah's and Abbas's position, which demands a return to the status quo ante as a precondition to dialogue drops from 46 percent last September to 39 percent in this poll. Support for Hamas's position, which calls for unconditional dialogue, increases from 27 percent to 37 percent during the same period."

Here are the survey results vis-a-vis the peace process:

• "66 percent support and 32 percent oppose the Saudi initiative, which calls for Arab recognition of and normalization of relations with Israel after it ends its occupation to Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and after the establishment of a Palestinian state.
• 55 percent support and 44 percent oppose mutual recognition of Israel as the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people as part of a permanent status agreement.
• But 80 percent believe that the negotiations launched by the Annapolis conference will fail while 14 percent believe it will succeed.
• Moreover, 68 percent believe that the chances for the establishment of a Palestinian state during the next five years are non-existent or weak and 30 percent believe chances are fair or high.
• 75 percent believe that the meetings between Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert are not beneficial and should be stopped while only 21 percent believe they are beneficial and should be continued.
• 64 percent support and 33 percent oppose launching rockets from the Gaza Strip against Israeli towns and cities such as Sderot and Ashkelon.
• An overwhelming majority of 84 percent support and 13 percent oppose the bombing attack that took place in a religious school in West Jerusalem. Support for this attack increases in the Gaza Strip (91 percent) compared to the West Bank (79 percent)."

The emphasis on the last poll result is added (though they meant to write "shooting," not "bombing," presumably), because it is the nutshell in which the psyche of the Palestinian "street" resides.

Each poll conducted by PSR — which, by the way, uses sample sizes large enough to trust the results, and reputable Israeli polling institutions have collaborated with PSR on past surveys — since the beginning of 2008 shows the same thing: an upward trend in popularity for anyone that can accomplish significant feats of violence on behalf of the Palestinian people.

That means that these poll results weren't a surprise to Haniyeh; he knew exactly how to win over the Palestinian people.

So disciples of Edward Said can jump up and down all they want about "Western imperialists," but here in America, President George W. Bush's approval ratings plummeted with each kernel of news about violence committed against terrorists on behalf of Americans, Europeans, Iraqis, and the general cause of freedom. By contrast, in the Palestinian "street," senseless violence committed on behalf of senseless, violent people against innocent teenage students is enough to solidify your lead in the polls.

Said's glazed over, proudly subversive followers would call drawing attention to this problem a form of "post-colonial" hysteria. But these PSR surveys are the sugar in Said's engine of intellectual Orientalism. They blow to pieces the apologetic theories of the leftist American academe, toppling its ivory tower and its minions.

Because the truth — unfortunately for Palestinian sympathizers and terrorist apologists — is right here in the PSR's findings: one hand may be shaking that of a Western diplomat, as long as the other hand is holding a grenade with Israel's name on it, ready to spill innocent blood.

As for which came first, the headless chicken or the rotten egg — maybe it's time to stop exploring the origin of the sequence, and start figuring out how to break the cycle.

(Author's note: This was originally published in the March 14 edition of The Jewish State)

With the new report by Special Rapporteur John Dugard, it can no longer suffice to say that the United Nations has egg on its face, for egg has simply become the world body's permanent visage.

Dugard is due to present his new report "on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to the UN Human Rights Council. In the section titled "Human rights in the West Bank and Jerusalem," Dugard reveals "the instruments that most seriously violate human rights" by Israel.

Among them, tellingly, is "the Judaization of Jerusalem."

Dugard, a South African lawyer, is responsible for investigating only Israel's potential human rights violations for the UNHRC, and has prepared his verdict, in the form of a 25-page report, for the council's first regular session of 2008.

The report is replete with the same types of factual errors, misrepresentations, alarmingly obvious bias, and preposterously uneducated contentions that we have all come to expect from Dugard and his employers, all written in a Narcissus-inspired third-person, with Dugard only and always referring to himself as "the Special Rapporteur."

But the kind of venomous anti-Semitism jubilantly offered to us on page 13 reveals that Dugard has stooped so low he would need an elevator to reach the Palestinians' weapons smuggling tunnels whose existence he so dutifully ignores.

Dugard was picked for this mission in part because of his South African residence, making him a perfect choice to level "apartheid" charges at the Jewish state. But that should be, for him, a double-edged sword; as a white South African he should also understand the sensitivity inherent in the way descriptions of race, religion, and nationality are couched. Indeed, he probably does.

So would Dugard dare call Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's policy of confiscating land from white owners "the blackification of Zimbabwe"? Would we hear him whine about the ongoing "Islamization" of Mecca or London? How about "the Orientalizing" of public universities?

Of course not, with good reason; such terms are racist, hateful, hurtful, discriminatory, and wildly inappropriate.

And "the Judaization" of anything belongs in that same category. As an indication of the phrase's nefarious intent, it was used by Adolf Hitler after he became Fuhrer of Germany's National Socialist Party.

"Internationalization today means only Judaization," Hitler told an audience in September 1922. "We in Germany have come to this: that a 60-million people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers. This was possible only because our civilization had first been Judaized.... Eisner said in 1918 that we had no right to demand the return of our prisoners -- he was only saying openly what all Jews were thinking. People who so think must feel how life tastes in a concentration camp."

Yasser Arafat used the term in 1998 as he threatened to launch what would soon be known as the Second Intifada.

"The Palestinian Authority has taken steps to actively struggle against the Israeli Judaization scheme.... The Palestinian Authority is ready to restart the intifada in order to stop the assault on the Arab character of Jerusalem," Arafat told the Algerian newspaper Sawt al-Ahrar on Aug. 1, 1998. A year earlier, Arafat had delivered a similar warning to then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The term is also a favorite of Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, who routinely calls for anti-Jewish riots in Israel and issues death threats to Israeli public officials, as he did to then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in November 2006. Salah also uses the term as a way to de-legitimize Israel and the Jews: "The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here," he said on March 10.

That's quite a legacy; from Hitler's prewar rhetoric, to Arafat's pre-intifada warning, to Sheikh Salah's death threats, to Dugard's rant. That means that the newest member of this club is also a member of the United Nations, which is something the world should watch very carefully.

Dugard's treatment of terrorism is also characteristic. In the report, he uses the word "terrorism" interchangeably with "terrorize," which enables him to equate Israeli actions, such as "sonic booms," with actual violence, like Palestinian "suicide bombs and Qassam rockets" -- all of which "must be condemned."

And although al-Qaeda and its Iranian associates have established themselves in Gaza, Dugard goes to great lengths to insist that Palestinian terrorism -- often enabled and sometimes carried out by al-Qaeda -- is quite different from terrorism enabled or carried out by, say, al-Qaeda.

"Common sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid, or military occupation," Dugard states in his report. "While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid, or occupation."

Ah, "common sense." Something tells me Israelis won't sleep any better knowing that the murderous rockets landing daily on Sderot, the recent deadly suicide bombing attack in Dimona, and the March 6 massacre of eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem weren't "mindless," but, rather, "inevitable."

But Dugard clears the whole mess up when he divulges "the root cause of Palestinian violence -- the occupation."

It's a Chico Marx "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" moment for Dugard. Palestinian violence is taking place because of the Israeli "occupation," which makes the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza quite prescient: the Arabs who massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929 did so because they saw the "occupation" coming. Ditto for the 3,000 fedayeen attacks in the year 1952 alone.

But maybe Dugard is referring to acts of violence in the Negev, where Sderot and Ashkelon are regular targets of Gaza-based terrorists. He must be forgetting the March 1954 ambush by terrorists of a bus traveling from Eilat to Tel Aviv, during which the terrorists shot every passenger one by one.

Or a year later, when terrorists attacked a Jewish wedding in the Negev town of Patish.

The list of those attacks is quite long, so perhaps Dugard is just referring to attacks around the Gaza border area. But then he'd have to exclude the 1957 murder of two Israeli civilians by Gazan terrorists at Nir Yitzhak.

No, that list is unfortunately too long to disregard as well, so he must be referring only to towns that are regularly directly attacked by Palestinians today. But that can't be, either, because then he'd have to ignore the 1956 murder of a woman in Ashkelon who was killed when terrorists threw hand grenades into her home.

Maybe he means terrorist attacks that are simply self-defense measures on Arab land. But then he'd have to explain why Arabs in Gaza killed or wounded several Israeli civilians by planting landmines on the Israeli side of the Gazan border in 1957.

I wonder what he thinks about all the Fatah terrorist attacks -- explicitly "Palestinian," as part of the PLO -- that began in 1965, two years before any "occupation."

Of course this is just a sampling, but the point is that Dugard exposes himself and the U.N. He decries the Road Map, because it forces Palestinians to swear off violence -- something he doesn't think should be a precondition for statehood. He claims Israel is still occupying Gaza thanks to "technological developments."

He blames Israel for conditions that "could produce chaos in the Gazan monetary system"; for the fact that Gaza's schoolchildren "lag behind refugee children elsewhere"; for a system of "road apartheid"; for obstructing Palestinian freedom of movement with "earth mounds"; for threatening "the social fabric of [Palestinian] society"; and for creating an ominous-sounding "permit regime."

He explains: "houses and structures may not be built without permits. The bureaucratic procedures for obtaining permits are cumbersome and in practice permits are rarely granted. As a result, Palestinians are frequently compelled to build homes without permits."

He complains that Israel's release of 779 prisoners was "such a small number of prisoners" so as to render the gesture meaningless. He then, inexplicably, mentions that there was a riot at Ketziot prison that resulted in one death and 250 injuries -- presumably, by Dugard's logic, a sure sign that these prisoners should be released into society.

All this buildup would certainly put a substantial amount of pressure on Dugard to provide a spectacular grand finale of his report. He does not disappoint.

Most American and European leaders, and certainly many Israelis and Palestinians, would respond in similar fashion if asked what a final status agreement would look like. They would probably describe it as the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with territory swaps to include major Jewish enclaves in Israel and major Arab enclaves in Palestine.

Such an agreement, however, would be illegal according to Dugard.

He states: "any agreement between the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli Government that recognizes settlements within the occupied Palestinian territory, or accepts the annexation by Israel of Palestinian land within the wall, will violate the Fourth Geneva Convention."

So, according to Dugard's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, a non-nation that's not a signatory to the Conventions is not at liberty to enter into a formal agreement if its new borders would not conform to Dugard's interpretation of an agreement it never entered into.

I guess it's good for the Palestinians that, ironically, when the PLO smugly tried to volunteer to follow some cherry-picked parts of the Geneva Conventions in 1989, the PLO and the all the signatories received a response from the Swiss Federal Council stating that it had no idea what kind of relevance or legality the PLO's letter had, "due to the uncertainty within the international community as to the existence or non-existence of a State of Palestine."

I'm sure John Dugard would be happy to explain it to them.

It is customary on Thanksgiving for Americans to talk about what we are thankful for. We certainly have much to appreciate, but it's doubtful we'd have all we have (or any of it) without people like my friend Danny.

Danny is a Captain in the United States Air Force. He is also engaged to one of my oldest, dearest friends, and has made her a deliriously happy bride-to-be. So for that alone, of course I am thankful.

But Danny comes from a military family; that is, a whole family of brave men and women who live their lives risking everything, every day, for us. Those families are not in short supply in the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and every other branch or division of our Armed Forces. Those families are plenteous, as are the even-more common individuals who risk their lives for us and our allies while their families, if they have families, are many thousands of miles away.

As a journalist, I haven't done much reporting on the war in Iraq. But that which I have written on the war has been part of what many would call the "truth surge" -- an attempt to mirror (without, of course, comparing) -- the remarkably gripping and off-the-mat revitalization of our Armed Forces' rebuilding mission following their successful Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Regardless of the level of daily progress in Iraq, however, the point is that the men and women of our Armed Forces are heroes. For that, I am thankful.

Brian De Palma doesn't agree, however. And whatever the Hollywood director is thankful for today, it isn't the aforementioned sacrifices by our troops.

That's because De Palma doesn't think my friend Danny is a hero. He doesn't think Danny's family are heroes, and he doesn't think much of Danny's fiancee Linda's year spent alternating between clinging to hope that Danny was OK and fighting loneliness.

And that's not because I'm staging or parroting some right-wing interpretation of De Palma's new movie, Redacted, in which De Palma portrays American soldiers as crazed, rabid rapists. It's because De Palma, in a press conference about the movie, in his own words clearly described exactly how he feels about our soldiers.

"The problem is that the language and the way the soldiers are truly reacting are in their blogs and in the videos they make and in the documentaries you see that are made from those videos. When you see these guys on television, they're nothing but giving talking points from whatever they’re supposed to say in order that the one specific image of how the war is going is supposed to be projected. And it's very much understandable."

Take a look at that last line: And it's very much understandable. In other words, we can clearly understand why soldiers wouldn't act like themselves in front of the American public. We might have some respect for these animals as long as we didn't see their true colors, is what De Palma is trying to say.

Look, it isn't a secret that De Palma is just a hack looking to profit off the war. But we can see why he wouldn't act that way at a press conference. We can see why he would just read talking points for the public without saying explicitly that he despises every man and woman in uniform. It's understandable.

You see, what's real is scripted, and what's scripted is real, in De Palma's world.

"We're in a new era of reality television, so if you can believe two people on a beach... are discussing how to scheme against two other people, and they're whispering to each other on 'Survivor', I think you can practically believe anything," De Palma told the press conference attendees.

Reality is unbelievable, so just to be safe, believe Hollywood. You know you can trust them.

And don't worry, though he hates the troops, De Palma hates President George W. Bush more. And his deranged hatred of Bush is the reason he's making this movie.

As he told audience members at the NY Film Festival:

"You know when this administration's over, all the things they did are all going to come out; the books are going to start being written by everybody that was involved in hiding things and manipulating things. And I — we — basically, just want to sort of end this war, you know, and by trying to show what the reality of this war is — stop sugarcoating it."

There you have it. The two reasons, in Brian De Palma's own words, why he and I are thankful for very different things as we celebrate Thanksgiving and head into the Chanukah-Christmas season.

De Palma believes that: (A) It's reasonable to portray our soldiers as subhuman destruction machines if it's for a noble cause, like trying to subvert a twice-elected sitting president's freedom- and democracy-spreading agenda, and (B) He's showing people the "reality" of the situation which, as De Palma told the audience earlier, the mainstream American media just wasn't exposing -- that the soldiers risking their lives in one of the most daring yet noble undertakings in modern history are really just psychopathic thugs.

Today, I'm thankful for what Danny and his fellow soldiers have done for us, and that in March Danny will vow to make my friend Linda eternally happy. Danny and Linda's families are thankful for that, too. My family, and my friends, are thankful for those things as well.

And I think we're all pretty thankful that we're nothing like Brian De Palma.

Question: Who are Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Peter Berkowitz, Nile Gardiner, and Norman Podhoretz?

Answer: They are Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Peter Berkowitz, and Nile Gardiner, respectively.

Confused? So is Newsweek, the author of this pictograph-riddle.

Newsweek, the weekly personality tabloid, recently went after presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani with disastrous results. Not only was the article — which focused on his team of experienced and highly respected conservative advisers — embarrassingly inaccurate, the magazine offered a sidebar with the pictures, names, and descriptions of the six top advisers to help its reader(s) keep track.

Except five out of six headshots are mislabled; only Robert Kasten's photo matches his name and description.


Anyone who still reads Newsweek knows by now that the magazine's writers and editors have never heard of Republicans; they have, however, heard of "neoconservatives" and have been known to appoint "neocons" sans research or contact with said "neocons".

Which makes it even less acceptable to have made such a huge mistake — if you only know one group ("neoconservatives") you should at least know that group. Newsweek admittedly knows nothing of the one thing it claims to know anything about.

Of course, the magazine's hatred of these fine people has to do with the fact that most of them are clear-thinking experts on Middle Eastern affairs. What is striking, however, is that the MSM has championed defeat in Iraq for so long, they are actually getting bored; it's time for them to defeat any prospects for peace in Israel — which is why champions of logic and reasoning like Pipes, Kramer, and Podhoretz are in their crosshairs.

Giuliani recently questioned the wisdom of establishing an independent Palestinian state when it's clear that that state would sponsor terrorism against Israel and the United States. That is a logical approach to the situation, but one that earns you the label "neoconservative" by the MSM.

As president, Giuliani would be careful not to undermine the safety and security of the United States and its important strategic and moral allies. But the MSM isn't concerned with the United States or its allies, so why would Giuliani, who is steadfast in his loyalty to Americans and our Israeli friends, appeal to Newsweek?

Newsweek is a New York-based publication, and New Yorkers are famously protective of the man whose accomplishments as mayor of NYC are still not even fully appreciated by many in the tri-state area. (He helped NJ and NYC simultaneously by catching welfare double-dippers, and his use of the trigger/broken windows crime theory to clean up some of the uncomprehendingly dirty and dangerous parts of the city was more creative and intellectually impressive than most people give him credit for.)

Yet, all it took for the MSM to turn on him completely was his brainy-yet-tough approach to brokering the Arab-Israeli conflict only in such a way that would not sign the Jewish state's death warrant.

Time Warner, Inc., is also based in New York. Yet its current events magazine TIME decided to report on the upcoming Annapolis peace parley from... Cairo. The article, titled "Can Annapolis Forge a Mideast Peace?" unsurprisingly includes exactly zero quotes or comments from Israeli sources.

What it does include, however, are 14 separate references to "Arab sources". Only three are named, and they are the peaceniks Bashar al-Assad (Syria's dictator), Ahmed Abul-Gheit (Egypt's foreign minister), and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal — and those references are either attributed to other news sources or public statements.

The only reference to Israeli points of view is the following sentence, written by the piece's author: "Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apparently prefers a looser conference agenda, one unlikely to commit to fresh negotiations."

Some form of the word "skepticism" was used three times in the article — never in a quote.

Arab "worry" or "concern" about lack of Israeli or American effort and concessions is referenced four times, and the author, Scott MacLeod, even uses the term "separation wall" to describe the Israeli security fence.

The term "photo-op" is thrown around, as are doubts about Israel's willingness to make peace and President George W. Bush's true intentions. The author refers to Hamas as Fatah's Islamic rival, failing to note that Hamas is actually Islamist, and that Fatah is at best Islamic (clearly not secular). And MacLeod doesn't feel it necessary to challenge either the Saudi prince's implication that Israel's settlements are illegal, or the Arab self-portrait as victims should the parley fail and the region descend into violence. (When was the last time Israelis launched an intifada?)

In other words, MacLeod wrote the article not by paying attention to the news, but by looking at his MSM handbook and relying on (only!) unnamed Arab sources.

So, memo to Giuliani: If you are skeptical about the creation of a Palestinian state, the media will come after you, (A) because you're not Arab or a terrorist apologist and (B) because you and your "neoconservative" advisers only want to go after enemies who have waged war against us.

Memo to everyone: If you want to become a mainstream media darling in the the United States, start by attacking our allies.

Otherwise, Newsweek doesn't even want to know your name.

You know something is wrong when our free speech laws are effectively a boon to President Ahmadinejad and a ban on President Gingrich.

Ahmadinejad’s American adventure needs no more mention here, but suffice it to say that the whole affair happened in defense of “freedom of speech”, yet that same freedom’s restrictions, which don’t apply to someone like Ahmadinejad, will keep former House Speaker Newt Gingrich from running for president.

It’s not ironic, it’s just sad — and it needs to encourage a concerted call to the American legislature that something is indeed wrong with the chokehold the McCain-Feingold law has put on political free speech.

Gingrich was mulling a run for the White House after watching the Republican Party stray from its cost-conscious, value-centric roots. He was about to launch a Web site to try to raise the $30 million he felt was needed for a presidential campaign when he was informed that his candidacy would endanger the nonprofit status of his American Solutions for Winning the Future organization.

American Solutions is Gingrich’s idea engine; its very purpose is to get everyday Americans involved in finding solutions to some of the country’s most vexing issues. Dialogue and public brainstorming are staples of Gingrich’s theory that the private sector, run by citizens, are nonstop producers of solutions the government simply can’t (or won’t) figure out.

Gingrich’s point is that private citizens and their endeavors are part of the “world that works”; the government is clearly not. An example he likes to use is that anyone using FedEx or UPS can track a shipment from its point of origin to its recipient, yet the government simply cannot locate some 12 million people inside its own borders.

Gingrich’s exclusion from the field of presidential candidates because of American Solutions means that he cannot run precisely because he is helping solve the country’s problems without turning a profit.

“He had to make a choice between being a citizen-activist, raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to America’s problems, or exploring a potential candidacy,” Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, told Politico.

This should raise so many red flags you’ll think you’re in the middle of a Chinese national pride parade.

For one, it tells us that the most important prerequisites for the highest office in the land are cash, money, and cash money.

What matters is cents, not sense.

Well, sense is what Gingrich has aplenty, and it’s what we need in a president. But McCain-Feingold would open Gingrich up to all sorts of penalties for his efforts on behalf of American Solutions while running for president. What McCain-Feingold does, in this case, is legislate the supposed unfairness of Gingrich speaking for American Solutions, because it would also give his candidacy exposure.

Conveniently, Republican John McCain and his Senate friends in the Democratic Party, such as Mrs. H. Clinton and B. Hussein Obama, didn’t have a problem with being a representative of the people in the United States Senate — voting on any law they want and putting their own names on mountains of gratuitous resolutions — and running for president at the same time.

McCain would likely make an excellent president for a number of reasons, but his lack of foresight in “reaching across the isle” for this bill hurts his own party and his standing within that party. What’s more, it hurts the American voters, and Gingrich’s candidacy is quite a pricey bit of legislative collateral damage.

But long before the bill’s effect on the 2008 elections became clear, Reason magazine pleaded for the bill to be “fixed” in time for the 2004 elections.

The magazine article, written by Jonathan Rauch and published on Oct. 7, 2004, starts out:

“Now it is official: The United States of America has a federal bureaucracy in charge of deciding who can say what about politicians during campaign season. We can argue, and people do, about whether this state of affairs is good or bad, better or worse than some alternative. What is inarguable is that America now has what amounts to a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years.”

The article went on to recite some of the more peculiar examples of the bill’s frustrating code.

It mentions conservative activist David Hardy, who was told by the FEC he could not advertise for his gun rights documentary during the pre-election season. Yet, it allowed a Republican group to promote the anti-terrorism efforts of congressional Republicans because no candidate was referred to in the ads.

The article’s most frustrating example was a case in July 2004 when an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin tried to encourage citizens to contact the offices of Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl and tell them to “oppose the filibuster” of conservative judicial nominations.

Feingold was up for re-election, so the ads did not tell people who to vote for, they did not mention political parties (both senators are Democrats), and did not mention the senators’ positions on the issue addressed in the ad. Nevertheless, the ads were forced off air in August of that year until after Election Day.

The group’s then-executive director said this:

“They’ve taken away our speech rights in just giving information on candidates, and now they’re taking away our lobbying rights. Congress is in session, there are legitimate issues before the Congress, and the public has a right to know about them.”

While the bill targets “soft money” contributions effectively, most Americans’ opinions on the role of the almighty dollar in our elections haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is what can be said in public by or about an elected official who is running for re-election; too, the law runs red-tape circles around incumbents’ challengers and their supporters.

In recent elections, Senator McCain has registered some impressive victories over his GOP rivals; this year, his defeat of Gingrich almost assuredly means that neither of them will serve as our next president.

Because of his class status and values, Gingrich most represents the average American. Because of the McCain-Feingold law, the average American will be underrepresented in office yet again in 2008. Because of Gingrich’s preternatural ability to lead and unite, it is all too likely that McCain-Feingold means the American voter will also be underserved in 2008 and beyond.

So, no President Gingrich. But we may have President McCain. Americans would gain a lot if that is the outcome, but would gain even more if President McCain introduced the nation to Secretary of State Gingrich.

Now that would be an American solution.

So, Mr. Mamman al-Aki, a good Syrian citizen, goes to polls to partake in his civic duty to vote for Syria's president.

He sees two names on the ballot; he knows one of them, Bashar al-Assad, the current president whose family has been in power since 1970. The other one is new, so he decides to give this fellow his support. He votes for "the other guy."

Feeling proud of himself, he goes home to his wife and tells her how he voted for the underdog so the poor man would feel good about himself.

"What?!? Are you crazy?" his wife responds. "They'll throw you in a dungeon cell and let you rot, then they'll come and take our home and everything we have, and kick me and the kids out into the street, if they even let us live! Go back, tell them you made a mistake, apologize, and change your vote to President al-Assad immediately!"

"My goodness, I didn't think of it that way," Mamman says. "I'll go back right away."

So Mamman goes back to town hall, and tells the guards at the voting booth what happened.

"I don't know what I was thinking," he pleads with them. "I guess I just wasn't paying attention. Please, let me change my vote to President al-Assad. That's who I want to lead our great country. Please."

"Relax," the guard tells him. "Go back home to your wife and children, eat some supper, and get some sleep."

"Yes, there is no need to worry," the other guard assures Mamman as he pats him on the back. "We have already fixed your mistake."

Ever wonder how Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad manages to win elections with 99 percent of the vote, just as his father did before him?
Well, it certainly doesn't seem to keep Democratic Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich awake at night.

Kucinich recently visited Syria, and met with the despotic al-Assad. The two commiserated on their dislike of President George W. Bush and his nation building efforts in Iraq. They aren't very fond of Bush's attempts to spread democracy to the Middle East, either.

It's not too difficult to imagine just how Kucinich could possibly find the gall to explore some moral equivalence between President Bush and the Syrian dictator and terrorist extraordinaire Bashar al-Assad, especially since he had already made his merry way across the bridge over the River Delusion, with Assad waiting with flowers and bated breath on the other side.

You see, once Kucinich found solidarity with Saddam Hussein's regime, it only makes sense that his next stop would be Syria.

Forget for a moment that Saddam's WMD have been in Syria for years now. There are a list of similarities that make's one wonder whether Kucinich even knows that Assad isn't Hussein.

Consider: Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, turned Syria's supposed non-Monarch led, people-powered state into a socialized, one-man led institution of fear and suppression.
Sound familiar? That's because it's exactly what Saddam Hussein did in Iraq.

The opposition in Iraq, main the Kurds, were slaughtered by the thousands by Saddam's armed forces. But a few years before Saddam carried out the Kurdish massacres, Assad had already massacred the opposition Syrians (like our intrepid voter Mammar al-Aki) by the thousands.

In 1990, Saddam's army invaded neighbor Kuwait and proceeded to impose colonial rule on the nation and imprison anyone they found that they didn't kill first.
Two months later, Assad's military completed its occupation of neighbor Lebanon, imposing colonial rule and killing or imprisoning anyone, even (or especially) government officials, that dared not toe the line.

Then there was the support for terrorists. While everyone knows that Saddam was connected to Abu Nidal, most of us remember former President Bill Clinton explaining to the American people exactly how Saddam was circumventing sanctions by producing chemical weapons in Sudan, where al-Qaeda was doing Saddam's dirty work and being paid with the kind of WMD that, at the time, only Iraq was building.

When Usama bin Laden visited Baghdad, he and Saddam's senior security staff helped coordinate al-Qaeda's foray into the Northern Iraq camps, where they would be given safe haven and weapons in return for doing some more of Saddam's dirty work, namely killing Kurds.

Soon after that, al-Qaeda and Saddam's Iraqi regime would cement their reputation as the two largest threats to global security and the United States.

Syria, under both Assads, would sponsor PLO and Hezbollah attacks on Israeli citizens. They helped trigger last year's Second Lebanon War, and actively participated by transporting rockets and other weapons in ambulances from Syria to Hezbollah launching pads in civilian Lebanese territory.

Currently, Syria is partnering with Iran to sponsor terror attacks against Americans and Iraqis in Iraq, Israelis in Israel, and Assad continues to arm terrorist cells that have been planning attacks in an attempt to derail the upcoming peace summit between Arab, Israeli, and American leaders.

And oh, by the way, Saddam had a habit of winning those nail-biting, 99-percent re-election victories.

Regardless, Kucinich said in an interview after his meeting with Assad:

                   "President Assad showed a real desire to play a role in helping to create a peaceful settlement of the conditions in Iraq, as well as a grander approach towards creating peace. So it was a very important meeting, and I felt honored to have the chance to speak with him."

Kucinich then said that Assad's willingness to take in Iraqi refugees (I guess Kucinich never asked him about Palestinian refugees or the Jews that were forcibly removed from their homes in Syria in 1948 and became Israeli refugees):

                  "[S]hows that here is a man, President Assad, who should be respected and appreciated for the role that he has played. And so it is important for the United States to take that gesture as a sign, a very powerful demonstration, of the willingness to try to achieve peace. And I think we need to move forward with that understanding."

But I'm sure Kucinich would agree that since the war in Iraq removed a dictator that used WMD on his own people, tortured thousands, and murdered thousands more, at least we accomplished something that benefited the world... right?

Here's another Kucinich gem from that interview:

                 "In the Christian Bible, there is a phrase that says: 'That which is crooked cannot be made straight.' The effort against Iraq was dishonest, or crooked, from the beginning, and nothing good can come of it, except: The international community is needed to become involved to put together a peace-keeping and security force that can move in as the U.S. determines that it must end the occupation..."

So, the U.S., with the help of Syrian peace-keepers, must end the occupation of Iraq which, according to Kucinich, accomplished nothing constructive, despite deposing one of the most murderous dictators in history.

There are people this bonkers in the world. Most of them, however, are not running for president.

From CNN's "God's Jewish Warriors":

President Shimon Peres: The legal advisor of the Foreign Ministry (MFA) doesn't tell us how to defend our lives.

CNN's Christiane Amanpour: Are you saying Theodore Meron was wrong [in saying that the settlements post-1967 violated the Fourth Geneva Convention]?

SP: I don't know if he was right or wrong from a legal point of view; but he was wrong from a pragmatic point of view. Israel was under a steady attack all the time.

CA: So, just to help me understand this, for the Israeli leadership at the time, pragmatism triumphed over international law.

SP: What you call pragmatism was, in our eyes, —

CA: (Interrupting and pointing disrespectfully) You just said pragmatism.

SP: (Cool as a cucumber) Pragmatism in the sense of security, of defending our lives, yes.

Thankfully, Amanpour's embarrassing bias, lack of even the most basic knowledge of Middle Eastern history, and the overall worthlessness of the settler-bashing project called "God's Jewish Warriors" have been exposed by any number of watchdogs, media critics, and even fellow members of the media. The series on the whole, "God's Warriors", has been panned for the same reasons.

But this particular conversation was problematic for me, because Peres, who handled himself so well it was unclear as to whether he even knew who Amanpour was (lucky him), intimated that Meron's opinion, later proven to be incorrect, might indeed be true.

The truth is that, once upon a time, Peres — an intelligent, eminently likable, and experienced public servant — would never have answered the question this way, but he has taken the role of peacemaker and doesn't seem to want to offend the purveyors of popular opinion, whose latest fad is to blame the settlers and religious Zionists for, well, everything. (I'm anticipating the next JFK docudrama to lay out how Ariel Sharon ordered the Gaza disengagement after discovering the settlers' role in the assassination. Nevermind that Gaza wouldn't fall to Israel for another four years after the murder, facts and numbers don't bother these people.)

Here's how the conversation should have gone:

Christiane Amanpour: Are you saying Theodore Meron was wrong?

Shimon Peres: Yes, he was. And here's why: You see, strange lady, the British Mandate states that the government "shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land." The Mandate, as your CNN anti-Zionist programmers should have loaded onto the hard drive of your android brain computer, referred to the entirety of what is now Israel, Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

Furthermore, you anti-religious interloper, the Mandate made clear that unless the nations that inherited Mandated property directly from the British Crown renounced their rights under the Mandate, the Mandated rights would continue under the new governments. Israel has not renounced its settlement rights, and, according to the Mandate, CNN "reporters" aren't permitted to do so for them.

Additionally, Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice, wrote that since "The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land", calling the settlements "illegal" has no basis in international law.

CA: (Pointing angrily at Peres, in a huff) But what about UN Resolution 242? Doesn't it state that the evil Zionist occupiers should withdraw from all of the territories captured?

SP: (Pinching himself to make sure he is awake and this woman is for real) Um, no, it doesn't. former US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Eugene Rostow helped craft the resolution, and pointed out in an essay you should have read that the resolution was written the way it was for a reason.
The resolution doesn't state that Israel should withdraw from "all" territories, "the" territories, or "all the" territories. It states Israel should withdraw "from territories". It also makes clear that which territories Israel withdraws from is up to the Israeli and Palestinian governments to mutually agree upon.

CA: (Alternately jumping up and down and stomping on the floor) But doesn't the resolution explicitly state that, as occupiers, the Zionists are forbidden from wearing any head covering that conceals their horns?

SP: (Yawing — he was actually asleep this time, but was woken by all the jumping and stomping) No, it doesn't say that either.

CA: (Now eating her chair, foaming at the mouth, and screaming) But Israel is occupying the territories!

SP: (Looking around the room for Ashton Kutcher, who he is now certain is "Punking" him) Actually, no, and please keep your voice down, this is a civilized society. As former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Meir Shamgar wrote, the Geneva Convention "is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign who was ousted and that he had been a legitimate sovereign."
Obviously, since there had been no "legitimate sovereign" in between British rule and Israeli rule, there could not possibly be an "occupation" — no one is being occupied.

Back to our friend Schwebel, who wrote in the American Journal of International Law:

"Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

So, since Egypt and Jordan had illegally occupied Gaza and the West Bank, respectively, prior to the 1967 war, Israel's claim over those areas is stronger than either of those countries'. Though, as we all know, Egypt and Jordan want nothing to do with those territories. One thing is for sure, according to international law, the territories are least of all Palestinian — no one involved has less of a claim to that land.

CA: (Now about two inches from Peres's nose and screaming in his face ceaselessly)...

SP: (Exiting with his bodyguards, leaving Amanpour screaming at the empty chair where Peres was sitting) This was fun.