In defense of Judge Goldstone, sort of

By Haviv Rettig Gur

Judge Richard Goldstone, the namesake of the report that convinced much of the world that Israel had indeed committed war crimes in Gaza, is getting a bad rap.

Not about the Goldstone Report, to be sure. That document, when you actually take the trouble to read it, is a collection of hearsay about Israeli brutality that fails to challenge the Palestinian witnesses but somehow still manages to conclude, unequivocally, that Israel violated the most sacred laws of human morality.

But, you know, that was last year. Water under the bridge.

Now, Judge Goldstone is facing a barrage of criticism in the Jewish world for his role as an enforcer of the law under the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Some details of his apartheid-era judicial rulings came to light last week in an expose published by Israel’s largest daily, Yediot Ahronot. The article blasted Goldstone for sentencing 28 blacks to death and enforcing – allegedly happily – the country’s racist laws, including jailing two young black men for possessing a video tape of a speech by an associate of Nelson Mandela and acquitting four police officers who had harassed a white woman believed to be sleeping with a non-white man.

For his part, Goldstone noted that he only sentenced two men to death, each time for a brutal murder, as was mandatory by South African law at the time, while the remaining 26 were failed appeals during his tenure on the Transvaal supreme court.

Reactions to the news came fast and furious. Jeffrey Goldberg commented that “this new report suggests not only that Goldstone is at best intermittently principled, but that he knew his old hanging-judge record would one day catch up with him.”

Alan Dershowitz declared that Goldstone’s defense that his death penalty convictions were in keeping with the law was not unlike that of the sadistic Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, continued the Holocaust theme by calling Goldstone’s response “sadly reminiscent of the long discredited so-called ‘Nuremberg defense’ – ‘l was only obeying orders.’”

On the facts, Goldstone probably has a stronger case than his detractors. His acquittal of the policemen, for example, was explicitly made because of errors in the legal proceedings against them. And even at his most egregious Goldstone’s death sentences are not different from the norm of some of the world’s strongest democracies even today. Japan, for instance, or the United States.

As South Africa’s former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson told me last week, Goldstone “was regarded by everyone who knew him as a liberal judge.”

It was Goldstone, Chaskalson noted, who in the 1980s declawed the infamous Group Areas Act by giving the courts discretion over the forced evictions of people living in the wrong racial districts.

So which is it? Is Goldstone the guilt-ridden former enforcer of legislated racism or a hero who once held the line against the worst offenses of a bad regime?

My answer: neither. He’s something much simpler. He’s a joiner.

Once, at the start of his career, Goldstone had to choose how he would behave in an immoral system. He chose to join it, and then by most accounts worked to correct it from within.

At the end of his career, he had to make that choice again. Once again, he chose to join. This time it was the UN Human Rights Council, which since its inception four years ago has devoted 82% of its censures to Israel alone and this year went to the trouble of praising Sri Lanka for defeating the Tamil Tigers in a war that cost 20,000 civilian lives.

In order for law to be the impartial arbiter of disputes, it needs certain fundamental institutions: the unbiased judge, an independent judiciary, a clear hierarchy of appeal, an elected legislature that assures that law emanates from the society to which it is being applied.

But the UN has none of these, because it is not in any sense a legal body. It is a political one that operates by mob rule.

Yet the effect of Goldstone’s report has been to attach the prestige of “law” to a non-legal public lashing of Israel commissioned by and for a political body already irredeemably prejudiced against Israel.

Goldstone himself insists that his report is not admissible as evidence in a court of law. It was merely “fact-finding,” he says. But who cares about the legal niceties when Goldstone himself seems to violate them in his report’s spectacularly adamant conclusions about Israel’s heinous violations of human rights law?

And so the question remains. Is he naïve? Or, as with apartheid, is he happily wielding a racist stick in the service of a higher cause?

Or maybe he’s still, as in his youth, simply a joiner.

Related posts:

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THE LIST:

1. Dr. Sandor Kepiro – Hungary

Sandor Kepiro (Alliance)

2. Milivoj Ašner – Austria

Milivoj Asner (l), Croatian Ustashi victims (r) (The Sun)

3. Samuel Kunz – Germany

4. Adolf Storms – Germany

5. Klaas Carel Faber – Germany

6. Karoly (Charles) Zentai – Australia

Charles Zentai (Deutsche Welle)

7. Soeren Kam – Germany

Soeren Kam (About.com)

8. Peter Egner – United States

Peter Egner (Seattle Weekly)

9. Algimantas Dailide – Germany

Algimantas Dailide (About.com)

10. Mikhail Gorshkow – Estonia

Not on the list, possibly dead:

Alois Brunner – Syria

Alois Brunner (Deutsche Welle)

Dr. Aribert Heim – Location unknown

Aribert Heim (Deutsche Welle)

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Almost anyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust, observing it from either near or far, will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out, seemed absolutely unbelievable—impossible. In retrospect, however, as we look back on the exact sequence of events that led to the tragedy, we tend to conceive of it as the culmination of a predetermined and unavoidable march of destiny. Such a complete turn-about in our attitude to past events is hardly unique, but in the case of the Holocaust the contradiction is an especially flagrant one because the contradictory attitudes are so emphatic. The enormity of the crime being committed by the Nazis, as intelligence of it began to filter into the countries outside the occupied areas, placed it beyond belief. Yet once it became evident that the unbelievable had indeed occurred, it began to seem altogether necessary and inevitable. Now the question, often put in a self-torturing way, is, how could we have overlooked the signs that unmistakably foretold the impending tragedy?

So begins a remarkable essay by Hebrew University sociologist Jacob Katz. Worth a read.

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In the ten short minutes I have been given, I’d like to try to offer what I believe is the Jewish public’s perspective on the issue at the heart of this conference. I am not an academic, but a journalist. Less an investigator of facts than an observer of public assumptions and beliefs.

It is from that perspective that I want to bring something to the attention of the scholars, activists and politicians gathered here – what I believe may amount to the central lesson that the world’s Jews have drawn from the Holocaust. You cannot understand Jewish politics and political structures of our day without, I believe, understanding this central lesson.

The Holocaust marks the crowning genocide of the bloodiest century in human history, in part because it was the most philosophically purposeful and intellectually sophisticated mass murder ever seen. But for Jews it is about more than the murder alone, about more even than six million Jewish lives and those of millions more enemies of the Nazi regime.

It is about the history-shattering power of hatred. The dead are already dead. But this capacity for hatred lives on.

Zionism is often spoken of as the Jewish national movement. This is a simplification that leads to misunderstanding its significance. Zionism is a huge spectrum of competing and even mutually exclusive movements – liberals, Marxists, religious messianists, revisionists. What they all shared, the core notion at the heart of Zionism – and this was the contribution most prominently of Theodor Herzl – is a sociological analysis, a theory about the structure and development of identity in modern times.

According to this theory, developed at the end of the 19th century, the complex destabilizing processes of industrialization, urbanization, the breakdown of old communities and identities throughout Europe, created new forms and structures of identity, most prominent among them the nationalisms of the 20th century.

The Jews who founded the Zionist movement viewed these new collectivist identities with fear, because they believed these new ideas contained within them deepseated capacities for brutality and murder.

This was not about Jews, but about all modernizing societies and all minorities. The Zionists feared for the future of their brethren in Europe, but Herzl also spoke about the peoples of Africa and the Muslim world passing through the traumatic crucible of modernization.

Horribly, catastrophically, the Zionists were right. In the name of national identity, Europeans collaborated in conscious, planned, industrial mass murder for several long years. Neither European liberalism, “civilization” or Christianity stood in the way of this murder. Everybody knew, many actively joined in.

The Holocaust demonstrated most starkly what the Zionist movement already knew from the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century: that human beings are not rational beings, that they think and act out of images and associations that are often more real to them than reality itself. Humans do not live well with logic. They live stories.

Thus, said the Zionists, nothing the Jews can say or do will change the powerful image of themselves in the minds and cultures of the surrounding societies. Only Jewish power, self-made Jewish independence, will guarantee the Jews survival.

In 1897, 90% of the world’s Jews were Europeans. Today that figure is perhaps 10%. Europe, for a thousand years the cradle of the largest Jewish civilization and greatest concentration of Jewish genius and achievement, is now mostly empty of Jews. Africa and Asia, too, realized the Zionists’ nightmare as country after country forcibly caused the evacuation of millennia-old Jewish communities, though by then the Jews had a refuge to which they could flee.

And so, if the Jewish people as a whole could speak here, I believe it would offer what is essentially Zionism’s most basic message and the idea that motivated the radical new Jewish survival strategy of statehood.

The Jews would offer a warning to the nations of the world: your history can be as profoundly shaped by your hatred as by your achievements and heroes. An ancient European people, one of Europe’s most accomplished and old, was utterly erased by the emotional and intellectual power of hatred. The burned flesh of our grandparents is proof that whole nations can be erased, continents destroyed, libraries burned and intellectuals corrupted by the power of hatred, by the images and stories that people can tell themselves about others. If it can happen to us, it can happen to you.

And at the heart of this hatred, the Jews would say, is the mobilizing power of identity.

Unlike with communism, no universalist redemption, however warped, underlay the Nazi project. Unlike dictators such as Franco or Saddam Hussein, no political ambition lay at its core. No demands were made of the Jews except their death.

We must urge and beg the nations of Eastern Europe not to accept the uniqueness of our experience, but the uniqueness and deforming effects of hatred itself in its purest form. We do not insist that the Holocaust was unique because it cannot happen to others. We insist it was unique because it can happen to others.

The identity-based massacre of the Holocaust is a human potential. There is nothing unique about Germans that allowed them to commit such a crime, as we discover in the history of the widespread Lithuanian mass murder of their Jewish neighbors, or the story of Rwanda.

Identity-based hatred is a historical force of unimaginable power, and the Holocaust is merely the greatest demonstration of its potential. We ignore it, we seek to dilute its message, to compare it with mere political evils like dictatorship or oppression, at our very grave peril.

This message, simple, clear, actionable, needs to become the banner of political activities being explored at this conference.

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Here’s an attempt to create some kind of ‘Palestinian Agency’:

The state of Palestine does not exist; the courts are still not working, local government has numerous problems, not to mention health care, education and infrastructure. Representatives of Palestinian communities abroad have come to Bethlehem to kick off the independent “Palestine Network.”

“Welcome to your second home,” announces Ramzi Khoury, executive director of the Palestine Network. “You are representatives from 23 countries who have chosen to be engaged in building this Palestinian state and not just talking about it. This is a do tank, rather than a talk tank. This is not a political club.”

…

“If you want to build a democratic state, you need to tackle all the sectors of that state,” Khoury says. “So doctors need to come down here and revamp our health system, engineers need to come here and help us build, lawyers and judges need to come and help us create an independent judiciary and a state of law, and we need educators.”

The Palestine Network is not just another charity or source of funding. The Palestinians have many economic backers. In 2008, global financial aid to the Palestinian Authority exceeded $2 billion, including about $526 million from Arab countries, $651m. from the European Union, $300m. from the US and about $238m. from the World Bank, according to the Arab League’s 2009 economic report.

The founding conference, sponsored by the governments of Germany and Belgium, was held in the opulent Convention Center on the outskirts of Bethlehem, hub of Palestinian culture and tourism.

The network’s goal is to use expertise from Palestine’s diaspora communities to develop the local economy, judiciary, education and health infrastructures in what will be the future state.

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The spread of technology of the kind that uncovered the Dubai operation has permanently altered the rules, wrote Yossi Melman, Haaretz’s intelligence correspondent. “The conclusion could be that the era of heroic operations in the style of James Bond movies is close to its end.”

Inspired by Dubai’s success, neighboring Abu Dhabi announced Wednesday that it would spend more than $120 million to blanket the city with surveillance cameras.

Today, said Gad Shimron, a field operative for the Mossad in the 1970s and 1980s, agents risk leaving electronic footprints everywhere: credit card charges, passport information in airport computers and easily traced cell phone calls. As Dubai demonstrated, they must also plan for the possibility that law enforcement will be able to put the pieces together.

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That’s my take-away from a beautiful and heartbreaking description of war’s moral complexity published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Well worth the read:

Five years ago, a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.

This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.

…

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

The question is important and well-portrayed, but I don’t think it’s entirely relevant to Israel’s situation. For one thing, the IDF has succeeded in repeatedly defeating its nonconventional enemies without great civilian casualties on either side. (30,000 of some of the best-trained infantrymen on Earth were fighting in densely-populated Gaza for a whole month, and even Hamas says that fully a third of the Palestinian dead were its fighters, who were operating at the time from within populated neighborhoods. If civilians were the target, as Goldstone and Hamas claim, then the IDF is rather frighteningly incompetent.)

But there’s another reason to obey the laws of war, besides the simple demonstration that you can still win while obeying them: for Israel’s adversaries, civilian dead are a weapon of great strategic significance. In fact, Hamas has no other strategic lever over Israel than forcing it into killing Palestinian civilians by targeting Israel’s own civilians. Neither act is tolerable for Israel politically and internationally, so creating this catch-22 – utterly ignored by Goldstone, incidentally – is the essence of Hamas’ strategy.

You can only de-incentivize Hamas’ particularly vicious brand of warfare by exacting a price for aggression without “giving” them Israeli or Palestinian civilian deaths.

With this thinking, a scrupulous adherence to the laws of war is not just morally important, but strategically advantageous.

Maybe that’s why the IDF, for all the criticism it faces abroad, has actually done better in avoiding civilian deaths than similar armies fighting in places like Helmand or Fallujah.

Related posts:

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Oscar Arias (Wikipedia)

In an interview with the Israeli news website YNet over the weekend (The English article is here, but the Hebrew one has the full quote I translated below), he says:

“In my conversations with the Palestinians, I’m trying to suggest a crazy idea – get rid of your army. In practical terms, this isn’t really a crazy idea, because we did it 61 years ago, and we have only benefited from it. In my opinion, a small state, a poor state like Palestine doesn’t need an army. Clearly not everyone will agree with me, but it takes a bit of courage to make such a decision and I hope the Palestinian Authority will have the courage to take this step.”

YNet’s Netanel Shlomovich adds:

The Costa Rican president’s position [on disarmament] will likely make the Netanyahu government happy, but not on all issues. During Arias’ term, Costa Rica established diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority and even recognized a Palestinian state. Yet President Arias doesn’t understand why these actions constitute a controversial decision.

“Over a hundred nations have recognized a Palestinian state. This was the vision of the United Nations from the partition agreement of 1947 that called for the establishment of two states. Very few people will disagree with the idea of two states,” [Arias said].

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Anti-Ahmadinejad protest in Rio de Janeiro last week, where demonstrators carried Brazilian, Israeli and gay pride flags.

Hat tip: Tom Gross.

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The Atlantic Wire, the blog section of the Atlantic magazine, juxtaposes my view on this with three other commentators extolling the idea. For the record, I wrote that unilateral statehood would give the Palestinians nothing while freeing Israel’s right-wing government from its standing obligations.

The other commentators, on the other hand, didn’t even try to deal with the question in strategic terms.

Yossi Sarid, as is his wont, is hopeful and optimistic to the point of irrelevance: “When he declares independence, Abbas should call upon the Jews living in the state of Palestine to preserve the peace and to do their part in building up the new country as full and equal citizens, enjoying fair representation in all of its institutions.”

Juan Cole is inexplicably paranoid: “Since the Netanyahu government is about the least likely government to negotiate a Palestinian state within 1967 borders you could imagine, the Palestinians are giving up any hopes that talks will lead anywhere. Moreover, since Netanyahu has secret plans to thousands of further Israeli houses on Palestinian land in the next few years, time is short.”

This is just plain weird. First of all, Netanyahu doesn’t need “secret plans.” There are perfectly non-secret construction plans available for public viewing in the Housing and Construction Ministry. Second, the non-negotiable Palestinian demands aren’t just about borders, but also about refugees, Jerusalem and other issues. Third, on Cole’s doubts about Netanyahu’s intentions, he would do well to remember that both Sinai and Gaza – two withdrawals that included dismantling settlements and resettling thousands of Jews – were carried out by right-wing governments.

Finally, Chris Hedges seals the debate by comparing Palestine to all sorts of non-comparable places: “It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine.”

But it didn’t work in Chechnya or Kurdistan, and worked only partially in Scotland and the Basque country – because these are all completely different situations.

Consider: Unlike in Kosovo, Israelis have been willing to withdraw from Palestine for over a decade (according to Tel Aviv University’s annual Peace Index). Unlike in either Georgia or Kosovo, Palestine has Hamas waiting in the wings to take over. Unlike in either Georgia or Kosovo, Israel is neither Russian nor Serbian in its intentions or in its political capacity for brutality.

Besides, supporting unilateral independence implies a trust in the current Palestinian leadership to get it right – to build institutions, to construct a national economy. Does Hedges trust them to do this?

The occupation is bad, undemocratic and temporary – even according to Israel’s own laws. But should the PA, which has suffered for almost two decades mainly from its own corrupt and incompetent leadership, unceremoniously jettison the entire Oslo process in the hope that more UN pressure will give them independence and prosperity? Will the need to negotiate over Jerusalem, refugees and borders disappear because Cuba, Sweden and Russia recognize Ramallah and Nablus as a “state” rather than an autonomous “authority?”

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Aftonbladet's Donald Bostrom

Donald Bostrom cancelled a scheduled appearance at a conference in Beirut after a visit to Israel in which he participated in dialogue on the issue, according to Army Radio. Bostrom was in Israel last month for a media conference in Dimona.

The Beirut conference was set to be an anti-Israel hate fest, according to reports.

“The visit to Israel and the fact that I was part of a fair dialogue made me rethink the whole issue,” Bostrom reportedly told associates, according to Ha’aretz.

In an article published in August in the popular Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Bostrom reported that Israel seized young Palestinian men and returned them to their families with missing organs.

The story, which ran under the headline “They plunder the organs of our sons,” also cited the recent arrest of a New York rabbi accused of trafficking in human organs.

During the Dimona conference Bostrom admitted that his only proof of the organ stealing came from the allegations of the Palestinian families.

Check out what Ha’aretz military reporter Anshel Pfeffer recently did to Bostrom’s story.

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First, there’s this Nov. 3 Foreign Policy article, which reports that “Whichever side of the fence you fall on, there’s no denying it: There’s a politics to human rights.”

Human Rights Watch reports (Amazon)

Yet these lists were also notable for the countries they did not include. When we used data on poverty, repression, and conflict to identify some of the worst places on earth, we found that few of these countries were covered much by either Amnesty or Human Rights Watch.

The reasons, the authors find:

At first, this seemed puzzling; why would the watchdogs neglect authoritarians? We asked both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and received similar replies. In some cases, staffers said, access to human rights victims in authoritarian countries was impossible, since the country’s borders were sealed or the repression was too harsh (think North Korea or Uzbekistan). In other instances, neglected countries were simply too small, poor, or unnewsworthy to inspire much media interest. With few journalists urgently demanding information about Niger, it made little sense to invest substantial reporting and advocacy resources there.

…It’s easier to sell people what they already want than to try create new demand, and businesses that do too much of the latter will quickly run into trouble.

The human rights groups defend themselves thus, according to the authors:

In response, the watchdogs say they call ‘em as they see ‘em, reporting as best they can on the misdeeds of democracies and authoritarians alike. Apologists who cry foul are being defensive and insular, refusing to acknowledge the seamy underside of their favored regimes. Fair point indeed.

Fair point? Why is this a fair point? They are demonstrably ignoring dictatorships and “some of the worst places on earth” in favor of media attention. Why do the article’s authors let them get away with the excuse that they are “reporting as best they can on the misdeeds of democracies and authoritarians alike,” when the whole point of the piece is that they do not, in fact, report on democracies and authoritarians alike whatsoever?

And why do the protestations of some Israelis or Americans constitute the “defensive and insular” protests of “apologists?”

I, for example, think Israel’s government is making a whole series of terrible mistakes on a vast range of issues, from religious personal status law to West Bank law enforcement to an imploding, nearly third-world education system. I have written about all these and more. But I also think human rights groups often behave like politicized news hounds who only have the courage to take on countries already so free and self-critical that their reporting is largely redundant.

Try this exercise. Take away Amnesty International’s criticism of Israel. Did anything change? Did Israel just get away with anything? Did Israel’s internal critics suddenly stop speaking? Now take away Amnesty coverage of Niger (what little there is) and ask yourself this: What’s left?

We already have a media – hostile, neutral and supportive alike – telling us Israel’s rights and wrongs. We need Amnesty and HRW to point the finger precisely at Niger. That they fail to do so, that they choose to follow in the media’s wake rather than step in front and bring attention to humanity’s most desperate members, is a far greater indictment of their work than the banal accusation of being “anti-Israel.”

Hat tip: Shmuel Rosner.

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Donald Bostrom (Aftonbladet)

Asked at the conference why he had accused the IDF of killing Palestinians for their organs, he replied: “I never wrote that and didn’t claim that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians to harvest their organs. I wrote that Palestinian families are claiming that is the case.”

He accused the media of distorting his report and accusing him of antisemitism for political purposes.

“It is known that there is an international problem of organ trafficking and I mentioned many countries, including Israel. My report has one conclusion, that we should continue investigating the Palestinian allegations.”

But then Anshel, a smart left-leaning Ha’aretz military reporter and a friend, does something absolutely despicable. He quotes Bostrom’s original story:

Anshel Pfeffer

In Aftonbladet Bostrom wrote that while the Israeli government was running a campaign encouraging Israelis to sign organ donor cards, “young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days, Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open. Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies. I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it.”

Bostrom wrote that he had interviewed “many” Palestinian families whose sons had been killed in this way but in the report he specifically mentions only one family.

Who me? Organ trafficking? I was just repeating what “the population of the occupied territories,” “UN staff,” “rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing,” “many” Palestinian families, and “nightly funerals of autopsied bodies” were saying. I never claimed it was true!

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The UK’s Mail on Sunday reports:

The British government is sending police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers. Their mission is to set up and train a new “internal affairs” department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice.

On Saturday a senior official from the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. British detectives will also train the Palestinian police and Preventive Security forces in how to question suspects without torturing them. Britain spends £20 million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, Nasser al-Shaer, a former academic from Manchester University who was deputy prime minister in the short-lived Hamas Palestinian Authority government elected in 2006, said many of those released from detention in recent months were telling the same story – of torture, including beatings, being suspended from the ceiling, and electric shocks.

Tom adds:

Now none of this is new. In spite of what the paper says, it has been continuing not just for the past two years, but since Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and took over most of the West Bank in 1993. What is new is that a major newspaper (The Mail On Sunday is one of Britain’s highest-circulation respected newspapers) is reporting on it.

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Washington’s conciliatory steps have given the Kremlin’s rulers confidence they have nothing to fear from Mr. Obama on anything that matters.

And nothing matters more to Mr. Putin and his oligarchs than the price of oil. Even with oil at $70 a barrel, Russia’s economy is in bad straits. Tension in the Middle East, even an outbreak of war, would push energy prices higher. A nuclear-armed Iran would, of course, be harmful to Russian national security, but prolonging the crisis is beneficial to the interests of the ruling elite: making money and staying in power.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy has directed a great deal of optimism and good will toward friends and foes. Such a cheery outlook is commendable as long as it does not clash with reality. Unfortunately, there were several clashes in the past week.

…

Like many Russians, I was encouraged by Mr. Obama’s inspirational speech in Moscow last July, but he must know there is more to statesmanship than printing money and making speeches. Inflated rhetoric, like inflated currency, can lead to disaster. The goodwill bubble Mr. Obama is creating will burst unless there are real results soon.

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Ahmadinejad showing family papers, March 2008 (Telegraph)

As the Telegraph reported yesterday:

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

So what to make of it? Does it matter that Ahmadinejad, who wants to destroy the last major Jewish enclave in the Eastern Hemisphere in the name of his Shi’ite messianism, was born a Jew?

In my opinion – not at all.

It isn’t Ahmadinejad’s possible hidden Jewish past that matters, but the fact that he must hide it. It isn’t the father’s alleged abandonment of Judaism that matters, but the son’s plan to murder the rest of them. If Ahmadinejad is Jewish, the significance is not his personal psycho-drama, but the baggage that the word “Jew” carries in his world and in large swaths of the Muslim world generally.

A day after the Telegraph report on Ahmadinejad, Pakistan Daily, an English-language Pakistani paper, published another Muslim-who-is-really-Jewish story about the Saudi royal family. The paper blames Saudi oppression on the secret history of the Saudi family, which it claims descended from a murderous, cheating Jew who usurped the legitimate tribal leaders of the Arabian peninsula through lies. Wahhabism itself, the paper claims, is a Jewish invention.

Give it a read. It’s a real hoot:

Their hideous Jewish family has, in fact, done all that kind of atrocities in the name of their false religious sect (the Wahabi), which has actually been invented by a Jew so as to sow the seeds of terror in the hearts if people in towns and villages. This Jewish Dynasty has been committing such brutal atrocities ever since 1163 A.H. They have named the whole Arabian Peninsula after their family name (Saudi Arabia) as if the whole region is their own personal real estate, and that all other inhabitants are their mere servants or slaves, toiling day and night for the pleasure of their masters (The Saudi Family.)

…

That was and still is the system of this regime of the Jewish family) (Saudi Family). All its goals are: plundering the wealth of the country, robbing, falsifying, and committing all kinds of atrocity, iniquity, and blasphemy-all are executed in compliance with their self invented Wahabi Sect which legalizes the chopping of the heads of their opposing subjects.

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Ahmadinejad in Natanz, April 2008

That Iran has secret nuclear facilities beyond its acknowledged ones is knuckle-draggingly obvious to all but the Jimmy Carter crowd. The revelation today that Western countries know about them is a minor relief. But that’s not the really good news.

Here’s the really good news (collated from the CNN and the New York Times) stories:

Obama: The new facility “is inconsistent with a peaceful (nuclear) program,” Obama said. “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow.” The newly revealed site “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.”

Brown: “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community. The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

Sarkozy: Iran “is taking the international community on a dangerous path,” and has two months to comply before crippling sanctions are imposed.

There are all sorts of ways to respond to this news: shrugging, promising a reinvigorated “engagement,” outright anger. It’s profoundly important that Obama, and some of his closest allies, have finally chosen anger.

It barely needs to be noted that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not just an Israeli problem. A nuke-backed Hizbullah will be the end of Lebanon. It will trigger an Arab scramble for parity that will bring nukes to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in short order. It will make the current Pakistani proliferation problem seem like child’s play.

If Obama wants to “engage” before resorting to paralyzing sanctions or even force, fine. But he has to do it in Middle Eastern fashion, with a clear sense of when he’s being cheated and a clearer willingness to up the ante in a game that, for the sake of all mankind, he really can’t lose.

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US troops over southern Afghanistan

The New York Times, which vociferously opposes the murder of noncombatants, was indirectly involved in the deaths of women, children and other civilians just a week ago. It happened near Kunduz, Afghanistan, when British and Afghani commandos liberated kidnapped Times journalist Stephen Farrell: Civilians were caught in the cross-fire and killed, as was Farrell’s Afghani interpreter.

Had the Times, a bastion of opposition to harming to civilians in war zones, known that civilians would be killed in the rescue, would it have preferred that the operation be called off, and that Farrell remain in the hands of his captors? What will it write if a similar operation is undertaken to release Gilad Schalit?

Unlike journalists, governments and field commanders deal with this dilemma every day. It is easy to decide when the target is a battalion of tanks in the desert. But it is more complex when the threat to a military unit comes from within a civilian environment – the very civilians the unit has been sent to protect. Ignoring the nature of military action is the height of hypocrisy.

Forget about investigating China, Somalia, etc. – which Israeli spokespeople are rightly noting is not on the agenda of the Human Rights Council – but where is the international investigation of American actions in Afghanistan? Oren notes:

In that same Afghan strip of land known as Kunduz, dozens of civilians were killed this month in an air strike carried out by American warplanes looking to provide cover fire for German forces on the ground. The incident is still being investigated, yet it is believed that the civilians did not die as a result of the actual bombing of fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban and which could later be used as mobile bombs against the Germans. Rather, the deaths are believed to have occurred as a result of explosions which took place after the air strikes, when civilians are believed to have tried to extract fuel from the tankers.

What other conclusion is there except this one?

In the end, it is not about the law, but about power, military and political. Goldstone is now free to go to Kunduz, but American might means there is no chance that he will.

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Chavez and Putin, Sept. 10, 2009 (AP)

First, Chavez announced he wants a nuclear program. But it’s okay, he said, because like Iran, his would be peaceful:

The Venezuelan leader is already dismissing critics’ concerns over his nuclear ambitions, offering assurances his aims are peaceful and that Venezuela will simply be following in the footsteps of other South American nations using atomic energy.

“I say it before the world: Venezuela is going to start the process of developing nuclear energy, but we’re not going to make an atomic bomb, so don’t be bothering us afterward … (with) something like what they have against Iran,” Chavez said Sunday.

The socialist president is closely allied with Iran and defends its nuclear program while the U.S. and other countries accuse Tehran of having a secret nuclear weapons program.

Who would actually sell crazy-man Chavez a nuclear reactor? Why, Russia, of course!

Yet his project remains in its planning stages and still faces a host of practical hurdles, likely requiring billions of dollars, as well as technology and expertise that Venezuela lacks.

Russia has offered to help bridge that gap, and Chavez has announced that the two countries have created an atomic energy commission.

The role of enabler of the nuclear ambitions of sketchy quasi-dictators seems to be par for the course for Russia right now (this paragraph about two-thirds of the way down):

Indeed, a senior Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday that Jerusalem was concerned that Russia was playing the role of “the wrench in the works” when it came to international pressure on Iran. “All the other nations are roughly on the same page. China seems to be taking its cue from Russia. It’s Russia that’s saying this [Iranian proposal] is something we can work with,” said the official.

In other happy-go-lucky Venezuela news, Venezuela’s foreign minister blamed US support for Columbia for the country’s growing arms purchases:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced a string of recent contracts with Moscow to buy 24 advanced fighter jets, 92 battle tanks and 300 surface-to-air missiles among other weapons acquisitions. The total value of the deals is more than six billion dollars.

A fierce US critic, Chavez has said the arms are not to threaten neighboring countries but a response to threats he sees from the US “empire” wanting to invade his oil-rich nation.

You get the general trend? Last Thursday, the Washington Post finally did.

Huge hat tip: Mere Rhetoric

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