189 ‘A Fifth Column’
First, this summary of the “Deadliest Day Yet in the Assault on Lebanon” from the Washington Post. Notice the Israelis are now bombing Christian neighborhoods… because, you know, Lebanese Christians are huge Hizbullah supporters.
Second, these AP photos, taken Monday, of Israeli girls writing messages on missiles destined for Lebanon:
Their parents must be very proud.
Third, those in the region puzzled by U.S. support for Israel or U.S. news reports on Israel will be interested to read what many Americans get in their email inboxes every day. Note the rhetorical similarities to Nasrallah’s speech (and thanks to the interplanetary illumati lizardman for forwarding these):
An Urgent Message on Israel
From the Desk of David HorowitzDear Supporter,
As I write, Hezbollah rockets are raining down on Haifa in the latest attempt by the Islamic jihad to destroy Israel, the only democracy and non-Muslim state in the Middle East.
This war is the same war America is fighting in Iraq. The enemies are the same- Islamic terrorists backed by Syria and Iran- and the stakes are the same, whether Islamic totalitarianism or democracy will prevail.
Israel is capable of defending herself. But behind Syria and Iran are Russia and China, and therefore she has always depended on her ally, the United States. I’m writing to you today because just as the Fifth Column left in this country has attempted to sabotage America’s war in Iraq, so America’s support for Israel is being undermined in alarming ways, and I badly need your support to help me fight back.
- Item one: As Israel came under attack last week, the producer of a talk show on a major Washington D.C. radio station declared that because the existence of Israel was bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, he could no longer support Israel’s right to exist.
This producer is a left-wing Jew.- Item two: Around the same time, the website Daily Kos, which is a power in the Democratic Party and is spearheading the campaign to unseat Joe Lieberman, posted an item headed, “Imagine a world without Israel.” The subhead read, “Or is that not allowed?” This kind of hate-Israel sentiment is common on the left, and the left’s influence is growing, especially in the Democratic Party.That is why I have called Israel “the canary in the mine.” The Islamic terror war against the United States mirrors its terror war against Israel, just as the left’s attack on Israel mirrors its attack on America.Just as Islamists accuse America of being the root cause of 9/11, so the left accuses Israel, a victim of fifty years of Arab wars to destroy it, of being the aggressor in the Middle East.
- Item three: The cover of The Washington Post’s magazine last Sunday was headlined, “Is the Israel Lobby Too Powerful?” The idea that Bush-Cheney-Rice and Rumsfeld are manipulated by a bunch of second and third tier Jews in the Administration is a modern-day version of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion which provided a text for Hitler and claimed that Jews ruled the world. But today it is entering the mainstream of liberal thought at an alarming speed.
Part of the reason this kind of anti-Israel, anti-American propaganda has traction is that people are woefully in the dark when it comes to the nature of the enemy we face.
Muslim and radical fanatics and haters of America and Israel operating in the universities and the press, along with their liberal fellow travelers, have been preaching the gospel that the Palestinians and the terrorists are actually victims of the imperialism of the West, and that their heinous acts against humanity are legitimate expressions of hopelessness and despair.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center is dedicated to combating these lies and defending America and Israel, the two pillars of Judaeo-Christian values and freedom in the world today.
Our website magazine, Frontpagemag.com, is devoted to reporting on the war at home and abroad, with a particular focus on the enemies of freedom in our own country who work day and night to undermine the war on terror. The Freedom Center has published hundreds of articles and dozens of books and pamphlets that confront these issues.
One of our publications is Big Lies: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel, which we have distributed to 300,000 individuals, including thousands of college students. It’s short, readable, and packed with facts that give a true history of Israel and counteract the lies spread by the left.
As the Islamic war against the West intensifies it is urgent that our voice be heard. There is no comparable group that is so unflinching in its willingness to define what this war is about, so fearless in its determination to combat the appeasers and terrorist fellow-travelers in our own camp, and so tireless in its efforts to bring these truths to the widest possible audience.
To help me and the Freedom Center fight this war, we need your contribution to help us print, distribute and promote the antidote to the leftist appeasers and nay-sayers. Will you give a contribution to help? I need contributions of $25, $50, $100 or more, or whatever is possible for you to give. Any amount will help. Follow this link to give.
Every $25 contributor will receive a copy of the Big Lies booklet as well as another booklet, Why Israel Is the Victim in the Middle East. Every contributor of $50 or more will receive a copy of my book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. Every contributor of $100 or more will receive an autographed copy of Unholy Alliance.
Please respond right away. We need to get the Big Lies booklet out as soon as possible and to as many people as possible…especially to the media commentators who are shaping opinions, and to members of Congress who are so critical to America’s policy on Israel.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Sincerely,
David Horowitz
P.S. Israel is part of a global war, the war of radical Islam against civilization. Right now Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world by taking on the terrorists. It is not only for Israel’s sake that we must get the facts out – it is for ourselves, America, for every free country in the world, and for civilization itself. Please respond today!
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More along the same lines:
ISRAEL UNDER FIRE
18 JULY – DAY SEVEN
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
- Some 70 locations in northern Israel hit by Katyushas overnight Monday, continuing on Tuesday morning including strikes on Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Afula, Haifa and Acre.
- Fresh barrages of rockets hit Haifa and Safed Tuesday afternoon.
- Rockets fired for the first time on communities in southern Golan Heights, possibly as a means for Hezbollah to draw Syria directly into the conflict.
- Thirty-five people wounded in rocket attacks throughout Monday; two in moderate-to-serious condition, one in moderate condition, 15 lightly wounded and 17 suffering from shock.
- An additional three reserve battalions have been called up. A ground offensive is not, however, expected at this time.
- IDF thwarts an infiltration attempt Monday night as Hezbollah cell attempts to enter Israel along the central region of the border.
- Israeli Air Force bombs launcher holding Iranian Zelzal missile, capable of hitting Tel Aviv, destroying the missile before it could be fired.
- PM Ehud Olmert makes major address to Knesset, calling for return of kidnapped soldiers, complete ceasefire, deployment of Lebanese army in all of southern Lebanon, expulsion of Hezbollah from the area and fulfillment of UN Resolution 1559.
For the latest news see the Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz and YNet.
PLEASE RESPOND TO THE FOLLOWING
Richard Cohen renders the rest of his Washington Post op-ed null and void by virtue of his shocking first paragraph: “The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”
Letters to the Washington Post. [original contained an email link here]
The UK Independent published, on Monday, a dreadful piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (click here to read full article) accusing Israel of apartheid and carrying out its military operations as a result of anti-Arab racism: “As we witness the bombardment by Israel of Lebanon and Gaza – a grotesque over-reaction – and, as the death toll of Arab civilians mounts, you have to ask how the Israelis can do what they do. My only answer now is to conclude that it is racism. No political or territorial struggles can convincingly explain or excuse the maddened onslaught by the Israeli state.”
She concludes by comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa: “Israel espouses the same ideology, religious self regard and policies to control Arabs today. True, the country has many enemies wishing its destruction, but racism and apartheid are still unacceptable, even more so for a country with such a history.”
Letters to the Independent.
Hunker Down With History, Richard Cohen, Washington Post
Nothing but anti-Arab racism can fully explain the behaviour of the Israelis, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The IndependentRECOMMENDED READING AND ANALYSIS
Investor’s Business Daily contends that Damascus and Tehran are pulling the strings and says: “Hezbollah and Hamas like to masquerade as “political parties,” legitimate parts of their respective governments. But so were the Nazis in 1930s Germany, and the West was forced to go to war to destroy both, when they could have been stopped earlier at a much lesser cost.The world has a history of appeasing tyrants on the march and ignoring the big picture. In 1936, the West refused to respond when Hitler ordered his horse-drawn infantry into the Rhineland. Today we dawdle at the U.N. while Iran races to complete its Manhattan Project and wages a proxy war against Israel in Lebanon. Imagine Hamas or Hezbollah with an Iranian nuke.
As Iranian rockets rain down on its cities, Tel Aviv may decide not to wait for that frightening possibility and decide that there’s been enough talk at the world body that is a fitting successor to the impotent League of Nations. Israel may strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities as it did with justification at Iraq’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. We need to see the big picture.”
David Aaronovitch defends Israel’s right to take action against Hezbollah in an excellent commentary in the Times of London: “An autonomous heavily armed militia, working from the territory of a state, has – without agreement from its own government (of which it is a part) – launched its own attacks on the territory of a neighbour. What is Israel, or any nation in that situation, supposed to do?”
The Boston Globe reports in-depth on Hezbollah’s weapons capabilities: “”The most significant change in terms of Iranian support for Hezbollah … is that Iran has also given Hezbollah much longer-range rockets that can be fired into major cities like Haifa – targets that are far more valuable and have far more propaganda value than the settlements and bases near the border – and Hezbollah has begun to use them,” said Anthony Cordesman , a security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.”
Meanwhile, despite a history of anti-Israel press statements, Human Rights Watch has declared that “Hezbollah’s attacks in Israel on Sunday and Monday were at best indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas, at worst the deliberate targeting of civilians. Either way, they were serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes.”
Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Khaled Abu Toameh takes a look at opposition to Hezbollah’s actions from within the Arab world itself: “The anti-Hizbullah coalition, which appears to be growing with every Israeli missile that drops on the heads of Hizbullah leaders and headquarters, is spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. These three countries, together with many Arab commentators and political analysts, are convinced that the leaders of Teheran and Damascus are using Hizbullah to divert attention from Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
The Saudis were the first to openly criticize Hizbullah, paving the way for other Arab countries to follow suit. The message coming out of these countries is that the Arabs and Muslims can’t afford to allow an irresponsible and adventurous organization like Hizbullah to drag the region to war. Government spokesmen and officials, as well as prominent Arab editors and commentators, have shown no sympathy for Hizbullah while appearing on pan-Arab TV networks like Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi.”
The Puppet Masters: Syria and Iran, Investor’s Business Daily
A heavily armed militia attacks your territory. What are you meant to do?, David Aaronovitch, The Times
Hezbollah arsenal may be substantial, Bryan Bender, Boston Globe
Hezbollah Rocket Attacks on Haifa Designed to Kill Civilians, Human Rights Watch [ouch… funny, they don’t link to this release, or this one]
Arab world fed up with Hizbullah, Khaled Abu Toameh
HOW YOU CAN HELP – DONATE TO HONESTREPORTING HERE
Israel’s international image is extremely important, particularly during a crisis of this magnitude. Please consider donating to Israeli causes, some of which are listed below, and also forward this communique and encourage others to subscribe to HonestReporting to enable them to better respond to media bias.
Some featured Israeli charities:
- Friends of the IDF – Make the lives of IDF soldiers easier by giving much needed “small comforts” in a time of crisis.
- Magen David Adom – Israel’s primary ambulance and emergency medical service.
- Western Galilee Hospital, Nahariya
- Zaka – Voluntary humanitarian rescue, life saving and recovery organisation, responding to incidents of terrorism, accidents or disasters.
- Moving our children to safety – Jewish Agency appeal – Help bring children in the north of Israel to summer camps in the centre.
- A Package From Home – Send care packages to IDF soldiers.
Due to the incredible volume of coverage, not all instances of media bias can be specifically highlighted by HonestReporting. Please contribute to HonestReporting so that our limited research capabilities can be upgraded in order to deal with as many media outlets as possible during this crisis. We call on our subscribers to go the extra mile and respond to the media where necessary. Click here to find contact details for major international media outlets.
How dare anyone suggest there’s such a thing as the Israel Lobby? Anti-Semites. Fifth column, Communist traitors. Out with the pitchforks.
Lastly, thanks to SP for her contributions to the Strangelovian Psycho file:
- Disgraced congressman Newt Gingrich crawls out from under his rock.
- In a more thoughtful response, William F. Buckley, Jr., seems confused. But at least he’s thinking.
- The AP’s Barry Schweid, who’s getting a reputation for being awfully opinionated for a wire reporter, reports on the USG point of view.
[tags]Lebanon, lebanon, israel, Israel[/tags]
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I’ve been reading your blog a lot lately just to get some non-U.S. news perspective on what is going on in Israel/Lebanon. Thanks for all of your posts.
Comment by Colleen OD — July 20, 2006 #
Nice round-up. FYI Barry Schweid, the AP State Dept. guy, is a notoriously ardent Zionist. He should not be reporting from State. I know this not only following his writing but also from a guy who’s the State Dept. correspondent at a prominent conservative American daily (hint: it does a lot of business reporting) who said that once on a trip with the Sec. to Jordan he was afraid to get out of the airport because he thought the Arabs would get him.
Comment by issandr — July 20, 2006 #
Reading more carefully, I just noticed that the Horowitz dispatch picks up on the Richard Cohen piece (the one that starts provocatively with the suggestion that “Israel itself is a mistake”) – if they bothered to read the rest of the article, they’d see that he spouts the usual Zionist rhetoric about how Muslims and Arabs are full of hate and deeply anti-Semitic and can never be expected to leave Israel in peace.
Supporters of Israel are also giving the media grief for reporting the outbreak of the conflict in terms of Hezbollah soldier capture-Israeli missile response-Hezbollah katyusha response. They insist that Israel responded not just to the capture of its soldiers but also to aerial bombardment by Hezbollah, even though according to every report I’ve read HA did not launch rockets till the Israelis did (though they did start things by capturing and killing Israeli soldiers along the border).
Comment by SP — July 21, 2006 #
amazingly good.
for a minute i was gonna call off the sit-in today infront of the israeli embassy here in tokyo.
Comment by Yazan — July 22, 2006 #
Elijah,
The photos of the Israeli girls doodling on mortars are not as cut and dried as originally believed (1,2).
SP,
Is it really propaganda, or a controversial notion, that much of the Arab and Muslim worlds are awash with anti-Semitism?
Comment by John-Paul Pagano — July 23, 2006 #
John Paul,
Oh come on, seriously now.
Comment by Yazan — July 23, 2006 #
Yazan,
I don’t know which point you’re responding to, and in either case, I don’t know what you disagree with. Please elaborate.
Comment by John-Paul Pagano — July 23, 2006 #
John Paul,
I have heard about anti-Semitic statements in Arab media, heard bigoted remarks from some Egyptians, and so on. I have also heard about the rhetoric of some far Right Israeli parties, watched documentaries in which Israeli settlers spout some pretty revolting rhetoric about Arabs, and heard putatively liberal Israeli-American colleagues voice racist stereotypes about Arabs too. I don’t deny that there is bigotry towards Jews among Arabs, though I don’t have enough personal experience with it to speak authoritatively. I would not, however, consider this reason enough to give Israel carte blanche to do what it will with Palestinians because they are bigoted – Israelis and Jews (again – some of them) can be just as bigoted and jingoistic, as can people from pretty much any country. The pictures above are an example of this.
And it is really sad to see them point to others’ bigotry to justify brutal and bigoted action towards them.
Comment by SP — July 24, 2006 #
SP,
My comment was not meant to suggest that one should “point to others? bigotry to justify brutal and bigoted action towards them”. On the other hand, I’d like to see among left-liberals a more realistic appraisal of ideological hatreds — especially, but not only, anti-Semitism — and how they shape policy in the Middle East. Much has been made of the practical reasons for Hezbollah’s cross-border attack; one should also consider its ideological drivers.
In recent years, the Right has characterized the Left’s dissent from the narrative of Middle East fascism (Baathist and Islamist), and its consequent refusal to directly address it, in terms of appeasement, cultural relativism, and its own anti-Semitism. There is truth to these charges. But outside of the fever swamps of the far-Left, the biggest blinder to the reality of Middle East fascism among left-liberals is their rationalist bias. (Paul Berman identifies and explains this in his indispensible Terror and Liberalism.)
Liberalism and the sundry socialisms are children of the Enlightenment. As such, they are deeply invested in the rational explanation of phenomena. Taken too far, this liberating departure from religious dogma can fail, or even refuse, to appreciate messianism as a political actor. That is to say, ideology (whether explicitly religious in content or not) can become an actor in its own right, and command the political psychology of a plurality of a people. This is very much the case with anti-Semitism (and related phenomena) in the Arab and Muslim worlds since 1967.
But in the rationalist worldview, this can’t simply happen. People — both individuals and societies — do things because of worldly and finite — i.e., rational — concerns. The Nazis weren’t a political cult driven by febrile hatred of Jews, mystical Teutonomania, and an intoxication with Manifest Destiny. They were desperate and angry people lashing out at the strictures of the Versailles Treaty! The Khmer Rouge weren’t primitivist lunatics in search of suicide in an agrarian utopia. They were driven temporarily mad by American bombing in Indochina! And so too, Osama bin Laden is seen by some not as the millenarian fascist he is, but rather (to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens) as a herald of the anti-globalization movement.
While an irrationalist analysis can lead to stupid and even dangerous results in the hands of nouveau conservatives, e.g. the Malkins, the Power Lines, and LGF, none of whom can envision a Muslim who isn’t a murderous automaton — on the other hand, rationalist bias seems to lead smarter and better people (the Praktikes and Matthew Yglesiases) away from a consideration of irrational human drivers.
This tendency, and not some Republican or neocon-devised crushing of dissent, is why the left-liberal opposition to war with Iraq failed to capture the American imagination. It’s why even after things began deteriorating in Iraq, Americans voted Bush in for a second term. The rationalist bias of left-liberals blunted their perception of the evils of Baathism and Islamofascism, and they failed to articulate a foreign policy alternative that addressed the grave dangers posed by these ideological cancers. And pace their European counterparts, most Americans don’t buy rationalist explanations for Arab and Muslim malfeasance. They don’t believe Hamas and Al Qaeda would dissolve if we ran our cars on linseed oil, or if the disembodied head of Ariel Sharon floated into the UN General Assembly and announced the dismantlement of Israel.
In the years after 9/11, left-liberals ceded the anti-totalitarian enterprise to the Right. Now look where that’s got us.
Comment by John-Paul Pagano — July 24, 2006 #
John Paul, stick to the point, would you, and spare me the treatises on the history of Left and Right. Your broad theoretical and intellectual-historical obsessions distract you, perhaps, from considering facts on the ground. Spend a little time studying these Islamist groups instead of positioning yourself into such and such camp and using easy, lazy labels like fascism.
Hitchens and Berman know squat about the issues, and the only people who admire their writings on Islamism are those who know even less.
Comment by SP — July 24, 2006 #
SP,
9/11 has really catalyzed changes in politics that have been fermenting since the rise of the New Left. Between the Holocaust and the late 1960s, it was considered progressive to be concerned with the welfare of Jews; now there isn’t a Third World thug whose nihilism might not be rationalized so long as he targets Israelis.
Or simply Jews, as Hezbollah did in 1994 when it blew up the AIMA building in Buenos Aires. It’s hard to think of something more fascist than that, but I don’t want to be pedantic. Another contemporary turnabout in politics is left-liberals, envigorated by Bush’s wreckage in Iraq, smugly informing you that you’re over-intellectualizing, that you’re not “reality-based” — i.e., essentially embracing the hostility to nuance refined in attacks against the Kerry candidacy.
But there I go labeling you again. (I feel like I’m in high school, shambling around Newbury Comics. Duuuuude, people are always so quick to label. It’s all just music, man.) For all I know, you’re a Buchananite. Whatever you are, it occurs to me there is nothing more bourgeois than refusing to recognize evil.
I’m not in the inner circle like you, but my novice study of Hezbollah finds Holocaust denial among its members; blood libels and the Protocols dramatized on Al-Manar TV; and photographs of Hezbollah recruits making the stiff-armed salute, in addition to attacks on Jews in Argentina and London. Please explain why calling this group fascist is “lazy”.
You say Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman don’t “know squat about the issues”. Well I say Edward Said and Juan Cole are full of shit. Neither is an argument. Why don’t you bother to explain why Paul Berman, who writes about Islamism after having read all of Sayyid Qutb’s English translations, doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Why don’t you explain why discussing Hezbollah’s ideology is not “[sticking] to the point”?
Comment by John-Paul Pagano — July 26, 2006 #
John Paul – there are other blogs where you can have conversations with yourself of the kind that you clearly love. Gazillions of American political blogs, as a matter of fact.
My narrow point was that Israelis and their sympathizers are so used to justifying just about anything they do as a response to hate-filled anti-Semitic Muslims that even someone like Cohen gets grief. That’s it.
Comment by SP — July 26, 2006 #
Eli, below is the result of a NY Times/CBS poll that was conducted a few days ago? Is 57% of America now, in your view, a Fifth Column?
75. What do you think about the way Israel is responding in the current conflict with
Hezbollah militants in Lebanon? Has Israel gone too far, not gone far enough, or has
Israel’s response been about right?
Gone too far — 26%
Not far enough — 9%
About right — 48%
DK/NA — 17%
Comment by James — July 28, 2006 #
James, the ‘fifth column’ headline was in quotes. It’s taken from one of The Lobby’s emails quoted above. The email accuses the Left of being a Fifth Column (gee, when was that done before in recent US history?), blames them for the fact that the war in Iraq didn’t turn out well, and raises the alarm that they’re sabotaging the fight against Lebanon/Hizbullah/Russia/China.
These are, I presume, the same people who felt so injured at the recent suggestion that support for Israel might not be in the US national interest, who felt accused of dual-loyalty.
As to the fact that most Americans support Israel’s actions, I’m actually struck by how low the figure is, despite the Alice-in-Wonderland coverage. And anyway, who gives a shit what Americans think? This situation is beyond American control. And remember, this is the same American public that cheered the Iraq war… before they didn’t.
Comment by Administrator — July 28, 2006 #
Eli, sorry, I misunderstood the headline (and didn’t really read the post). I’m not sure what you mean by Alice in Wonderland coverage though. Last night CNN had a discussion of whether the “obvious support” for Israel of the US hurt our ability to be an “honest broker” in the region. There was also a feature about a bombed apartment building, complete with pristine wedding photo pictures and children’s dolls amidst the rubble.
Comment by James — July 28, 2006 #
JP – I was enjoying the debate with SP too much to weigh in. But I can’t resist the links “explaining the context” behind those photos. Come on, man. Cry me a river. Reminds me of the people who try to explain away photos of little Palestinian kids dressed up as suicide bombers by saying, “Well, you have to understand that life for Palestinians is really hard…” Bullshit. It’s sick, no matter who does it.
Comment by Administrator — August 1, 2006 #
Eli,
No, the relevant bits were those about how 1) their parents did it (or most of it); and 2) how the photographers egged the kids on. Just thought it was worth mentioning.
Either way, I’m largely bored by the “whose kids are more barbaric” argument. Sometimes it’s worth bringing up, but mostly I leave that kind of thing to the LGF vermin.
Comment by John-Paul Pagano — August 3, 2006 #