Israel

Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives

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The Western left’s criticism of Israel’s role in Middle East conflict has long since become so bizarrely lopsided and vicious that many non-leftists have concluded that only antisemitism can explain it.

The left makes sure that every real and imagined military misstep on Israel’s part becomes international news, while ignoring the intentionally brutal attacks of Israel’s enemies against both Israel and their own people. The left contends that democratic, relatively multicultural Israel ultimately makes the evil decisions that drive the conflict and not the autocratic regimes attacking Israel. The left claims that the conflict can end only when Israel reforms, gives up or even disappears. The left requires almost no concrete action towards peace on the part of Israel’s enemies while demanding that Israel take concrete actions merely to get the enemies to even begin to think about negotiating.

Such extreme and thoughtless imbalance in the face of objective facts is one of the hallmarks of bigotry but I don’t think antisemitism drives the left’s stance on Israel. Instead, I think the mindless criticism a kind of intellectual mass hysteria that creates a delusional narrative so encompassing and so immersive that leftists begin to see it as unquestionable truth.

In short, the left is trapped in an immersive story in which Israel is the villain. Any fact that disrupts the “plot” gets edited out of the narrative.

That might sound overwrought but we have seen a mass delusional narrative before…

… the Vietnam era “peace” movement.

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Mini-Book Review — Ross — The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad

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Ross, Michael with Jonathan Kay, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007. 278 pp.

Recommended by Ishmael Jones, author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Culture, reviewed here on chicagoboyz.

In late 1982, 21 year-old Michael Ross arrived in Israel to escape cold weather. After a three year hitch in the Canadian Army, tackled right out of high school, he was on vacation. Backpackers visiting Europe on a budget often traded their wintertime labour at Israeli kibbutzim for free room and board. Michael was soon headed for one in the Beit Shean valley.

Hailing from Victoria, British Columbia and a mildly Anglican religious background, even being in Israel was a stretch. Far more likely that he’d be kayaking, or mountain-biking, or growing dope up in the Rockies. Short of the North Island of New Zealand, or perhaps Marin County, California, there’s hardly a more heavenly place in the English-speaking world than the Gulf Islands between the city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It’s “Lotus-land” to eastern Canadians. A young man just out of an army should have found all the pleasure and excitement he could want in the Pacific Coast lifestyle.

Michael’s background certainly didn’t suggest a future in one of the most respected, yet constantly imperiled, clandestine services in the world — the Mossad. Nor could it predict that he would take a side in one of the nastiest confrontations between the modern industrialized world and its neighbours. Yet for almost two decades “Michael Ross” was to serve in a variety of military and intelligence roles for his adopted home under conditions of unimaginable danger. How he came to do so is both fascinating and rather unsettling.

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A New Synagogue in Litchfield?

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The Historic District Commission of Litchfield, CT has–on grounds that many consider as pretty questionable–rejected the application of the Chabad Lubovitch group to renovate a historic house and turn it into a synagogue. The remodeled building was also to have included an apartment for the rabbi, and a swimming pool for the Chabad-sponsored summer camp. Story here.

I don’t know if the denial of this application is or is not consistent with the rules under with the Historic District Commission is supposed to be operating, but I do think that some of the comments reported to have been made during the discussions were pretty inappropriate and pretty disturbing.

Now, maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen the speech in which President Obama defends the Litchfield synagogue in the same way that he defended the Ground Zero mosque. Nor have I seen Nancy Pelosi demanding an investigation of synagogue opponents in the same way that she demanded an investigation of GZ mosque opponents. And will the “human rights activists” and liberal clergymen who have been so fervent in their defense of the mosque project also step up to defend the Litchfield synagogue project? I think we all know the answer.

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After Iran Gets The Bomb

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The decision by President George W. Bush in 2006 to forgo hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities has made Iran acquiring the atomic bomb, and worldwide catalytic nuclear proliferation, inevitable. This will have horrid consequences for the world and for American liberty at home. It will leave the world we live in an unrecognizable dystopia.

To use the May 16, 2006 words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:

“… The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands. The negotiations on Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation mark a watershed. A failed diplomacy would leave us with a choice between the use of force or a world where restraint has been eroded by the inability or unwillingness of countries that have the most to lose to restrain defiant fanatics. One need only imagine what would have happened had any of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Istanbul or Bali involved even the crudest nuclear weapon.
 
…An indefinite continuation of the stalemate would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants into the nuclear club. In Asia, it would spell the near-certain addition of South Korea and Japan; in the Middle East, countries such as Turkey, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia could enter the field. In such a world, all significant industrial countries would consider nuclear weapons an indispensable status symbol. Radical elements throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere would gain strength from the successful defiance of the major nuclear powers.
 
…The management of a nuclear-armed world would be infinitely more complex than maintaining the deterrent balance of two Cold War superpowers. The various nuclear countries would not only have to maintain deterrent balances with their own adversaries, a process that would not necessarily follow the principles and practices evolved over decades among the existing nuclear states. They would also have the ability and incentives to declare themselves as interested parties in general confrontations. Especially Iran, and eventually other countries of similar orientation, would be able to use nuclear arsenals to protect their revolutionary activities around the world.

That was said in 2006. It is now 2010. Kissinger’s world is now upon us.

Aircraft can fly between North Korea and Iran via China and Pakistan. If they don’t land in Pakistan at bases where we can inspect them, America will have little and unverifiable information about their contents, such as weapons-grade fissionables and nuclear weapons components. So Iran can assemble its nukes in North Korea, using North Korean fissionables, fly them to Iran via China and Pakistan, and test them in Iran.

The real question here is not whether Iran has working nuclear weapons – they certainly have that capability given that North Korea produced more than 60kg of weapons-grade plutonium – but the status of their warhead fabrication capability, i.e., can they put working nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles?

I think the answer is “Yes” and I gave my reasons why in a post titled Count Down to Iran’s Nuclear Test Revisited on the Winds of Change blog in April 2006.

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Your Tax Dollars, Funding Palestinian Propaganda

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The U.S. government is funding an ad campaign in Israel featuring billboards of Palestinian officials asking: “We are partners — what about you?” The Agency for International development “invested” $250,000 toward the billboards.

Via Michelle Malkin, who notes that a Democratic Congressman has been circlating talking points about how great this administration’s support for Israel has been.

Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorists have murdered four more Israelis, right down the road from Daniel Jackson’s house.