What's New at Think-Israel.org

FORMER TERRORIST'S ADVICE FOR FIGHTING JIHAD: THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY by Rob Margetta

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

The first rule of warfare is: know your enemy. We don't. Seven years after 9/11 and we still haven't settled on who or what we're fighting. Is it the blight of poverty, despair, political disenfranchisement? If that's true, all we have to do is cure the ills of the world and terrorism will stop. Put another way, because we can never cure all the world's problems, the anarchistic forms of terror we now are seeing will never stop. We know we aren't fighting terror per se. The term Terror is descriptive of procedures and tactics used by terrorists. Even as we begin to identify that our troubles are caused by Middle Eastern terrorists, we haven't settled on a name that subsumes the local manifestions: Hamas, Hezbullah, Al Fatah, etc. Should we call them Islamists? radical Islam? resurgent Islam? Rob Margetta writes about a recent Senate attempt to come to grips with the nature of the terrorists who have declared us their enemy and how to deal with them.

TRIPLE CROSS: HOW BRITAIN CREATED THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT by Rachel Neuwirth

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

In 1917, Britain was entrusted by the League of Nations to strive to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home," (national home was Nordau-talk for state.) When the authority of the League was transferred to the U.N., Mandated Palestine continued to be in perpetual trust for the Jewish people and was so written into the the U.N. Charter.

BREAKING DOWN OBAMA'S AIPAC SPEECH by Sultan Knish

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Sultan Knish doesn't waste his time trying to decide whether Barak Obama meant it when he said blah, blah or when he said aha-ah-blah, blah, the two being completely contradictory. Instead he shows us how to boil down some typical political speeches to extract the meager supply of actual information they contain.

THE MYTH OF LINKAGE by Martin Kramer

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Martin Kramer disassembles the insidious and incorrect notion that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the cause/root/essential condition that keeps the Middle East turbulent. As Walter Reich wrote in a comment to this article: "Martin Kramer's post is a superbly-executed and much-needed act of intellectual hygiene about "linkage" and the "Middle East conflict." It's a corrective — to use a phrase that others, alas, have invented — to "stinkin' thinkin'" about one of the most important dimensions of international affairs.

THE INVENTION OF PALESTINE by Tsafrir Ronen

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Tsafrir Ronen bluntly provides us with some historic facts that are usually ignored by diplomats formulating a fantasy of two people living side by side in peace, when the reality is that one of these people — the Palestinian Arabs — is not an authentic people. They were invented as a way to challenge the Jewish people's return to their land.

JEWS, POWER AND THE CREATION OF THE PALESTINIANS by Seth J. Frantzman

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Seth Frantzman has written a singular and brilliant essay. He sums up the components and evaluates the essentials of the Jewish attitude against taking political responsibility — an attitude initially conditioned by the need to maintain a non-threatening profile in order to survive in a hostile diaspora. Unfortunately, the Jews internalized the need not to challenge the prevailing political and religious powers. They developed ways of surviving, but achieving independent political power was not one of them.

THE TWO-PRONGED ASSAULT ON RELIGIOUS ZIONISM by Caroline B. Glick

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Caroline Glick makes clear what many have long suspected — driving Jews from their homes in Gaza had little to do with peace or security and much to do with the hostility the far-left Israeli secularists feels toward religious Zionist Jews because they want to be Jews, not Marxists. The expulsion "...wasn't about peace with the Arabs. It was about cultural supremacy within Israel."

RAPTORS IN LACHISH; WEDDING IN SUSSIYAH by Rachel Saperstein

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:10 -0800

Two short essays, deceptively simple. Raptors make a stopover in Israel on the way to Europe. On land needed by people who need housing. How do you prioritize? Rephrase the question and the answer changes. In the second essay, we learn how some of the Israeli young are connecting themselves to their people's history. Rachel Saperstein always leaves us with much to think about.

MIDEAST SURVIVAL GUIDE by Mordechai Kedar

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

Mordechai Kedar has a prescription on how to survive in the Middle East: The patience to outwait and outwit resurgent Islam; an ideology that bolsters our faith in what we need to do and makes us confident as we struggle; and endurance Â — staying in for the long haul, not quitting at the first sign of trouble. Is it any different for us in America?

THE LIZARD NAMED OZ by Lee Kaplan

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

Lee Kaplan draws us a character sketch of Avraham Oz, a professor of theatre and drama studies and a darling of the Israel-hating press, both at home in Israel and abroad. He can always be counted on to see Jews as bad, their terrorist neighbors as good, or at least as justified in their despicable behavior. "The Arabs keep claiming they are being ethnically cleansed as their population in Gaza and Yesha increases almost exponentially." The Arab choir has a stock set of derogatory phrases to condition people to despise Israel, its army and its citizens. And Oz is one of their lead singers, mouthing their words and specializing in demoralizing his own country.

UNRWA: REFUGE OF REJECTIONISM by Barry Rubin, Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Spyer

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

This report, recently released by the GLORIA Center, details how UNRWA, nominally a humanitarian effort to help Palestinian refugees, uses its huge budget to hamper resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and blocks the resettlement of its ever-growing number of charges. Oh, and it also furnishes finances, facilities, and recruits for terrorist groups Â — but that it does for free.

WALKING WITH ANGELS AT THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER by Dexter Van Zile

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

Dexter Van Zile writes, "NCR, the National Catholic Reporter (which has no official ties to the Roman Catholic Church) offers its readers an ideologically-driven narrative of the Middle East conflict that demonizes Israel and excuses and minimizes the behavior of those who seek its destruction. It portrays the state of Israel's history as a trail of blood, bereft of any efforts to make peace with its adversaries. And yes, in the process of offering this distorted narrative, NCR uses Jewish 'self-criticism' as an important source for its remorseless denunciation of Israel..." Van Zile does a masterful job of profiling some of NCR columnists, writers and editors: Robert Fisk, Rosemary Ruether, Neve Gordon and Margot Patterson.

GOOGLE EARTH: A NEW PLATFORM FOR ANTI-ISRAEL PROPAGANDA AND REPLACEMENT GEOGRAPHY by Andre Oboler

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

Andre Oboler writes on Google Earth, which allows pro-Palestinians to post glaringly incorrect "information" on putative Arab pre-ownership of current Israeli towns (they call it "user-generated content"), yet Google claims to "provide critical tools for understanding a story." They are saying "trust me" but they knowing let users post falsehoods under their imprimatur Â — they don't withdraw the patently false information. It is true that they allow separate user-created overlays from many different sources; it is equally true that the default overlay is Arab propaganda. Moreover, if it continues to take time and legal effort to force Google to make individual changes in an error-riddled map, how can we ever feel secure in what is still displayed? What a shame it is to lose confidence in a once well-regarded information-gathering resource!

TACTICAL HUDNA AND ISLAMIST INTOLERANCE

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

In analyzing the historic context that anchors the meaning of the term hudna Â — whose surface meaning is cease fire during a jihad Â — Denis MacEoin makes us understand that jihad itself must be continuous because it is designed to spread Islam, which "... holds that a set of rules exists, eternal, divinely ordained, and independent of the will of man, which defines the proper ordering of society. ..." These rules are intended to apply to all governments in the world and they are of course to be defined and controlled by Muslims. All Muslims can agree that Muslims must rule over infidels and this has given motive power for yet another jihad. History also demonstrates the instability and chronic internal war in Muslim governance. The various factions waged war against each other one. Generally the more barbaric ones would take power, only to lose it as another group grew strong and nasty enough to win the people's admiration.

THE MEDIA AND ENDURING NARRATIVE by Caroline Glick

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:52:09 -0800

Caroline Glick makes clear that pro-Arab media such as BBC consistently minimizes the grotesque behavior of the Palestinians Arabs, to the point that there are only two known clips taken at the exact moment of the terror attack. And in both cases, the media apologized to the terrorists for showing them. The Arabs, themselves, unlike the Jews, dramatize their "victimhood" by showing their dead, preferably young, chopped up, and bloody. Glick states bluntly that BBC apologized ".. not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel." She highlights the problem inherent in the media-Arab connection: by showing one-sided images and ignoring underlying causes, the media's reinforces the Arab interpretation of events.