Author: Jim Lobe

Obsession, the Islamophobic video that has been distributed via newspaper inserts to some 28 million households in key swing states this fall, is getting some overdue negative attention from the mainstream media at last. The Washington Post carried an article about the video Sunday that made it clear that the mass distribution was intended to influence the election in the Republicans’ favor. And Monday’s Atlantic online blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “The Jewish Extremists Behind Obsession” was particularly notable.

He casts a remarkably negative light on Aish HaTorah, the Israeli organization whose U.S.-based officials, in Goldberg’s words, “are up to their chins in this project.” (I think IPS was the first news source to point out the connection between Aish and Obsession in an article published back in March, 2007, although more has since come out, including a recent IPS update in September which noted other Israeli connections to the video and its distribution.)

I especially appreciated Goldberg’s identification of the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick as one of his “favorite hysterics” — I posted on one of her fulminations last June — and as those behind the project as representing the “lunatic fringe.” In addition to Glick, who also heads the Middle East program at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Goldberg would presumably apply that description to Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who played prominent roles in the video. It was Goldberg, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), who wrote that passionate indictment, “Israel’s ‘America Problem’” in the Washington Post’s Outlook section last May of the major national Jewish organizations, particularly the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, for confusing “pro-Israel” with being pro-settler in their advocacy efforts.

Of course, the producer/distributor of Obsession was the still-mysterious Clarion Fund, which has just released a sequel, The Third Jihad about which my colleague Eli Clifton posted earlier this month. The new video, originally intended for distribution before next week’s election, according to the Post’s article, suffered production delays (hence, the distribution of Obsession instead).

While I haven’t yet seen it, I understand that it features commentary by Clifford May of the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and, more prominently, Princeton historian and neo-con icon Bernard Lewis, who, according to various accounts, helped persuade Dick Cheney, among others, that the Iraq invasion would be a very good thing for all concerned. It was also Lewis who on August 8, 2006, predicted on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would very possibly launch an attack on Israel exactly two weeks later, on August 22, to mark “the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This [date],” he went on, “might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” Goldberg’s words about “hysterics” and “the lunatic fringe” come to mind.

Nonetheless, it was just six months later that, with Cheney in attendance, Lewis delivered the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) annual Irving Kristol Lecture — in which he warned that militant Islam was launching its third attempt to conquer Europe and the West through “terror and migration.” And it was presumably after that that he sat down for a long interview with the Islamophobic makers of Obsession and The Third Jihad.

Incidentally, for a penetrating analysis of Obsession, read a review by David Shasha featured on Richard Silverstein’s blog at the Tikun Olam site.

I made a mistake and rush to correct it. The photo of the Afghan mujahadin does not include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar because, contrary to my contention in this post, he did not meet with Ronald Reagan in the White House. It was not for lack of an invitation, however. In fact, it was Hekmatyar who spurned the White House’s invitation.

Hekmatyar came to the U.S. in 1985 as part of a delegation of mujahadin leaders to lobby diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly. Despite enormous pressure by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which channeled a disproportionate amount of CIA and Saudi covert aid to him, Hekmatyar reportedly refused to meet with Reagan, arguing that any “palling around” with the leader of the Free World would be used by the Soviet Union and the Afghan secret police, the KHAD, to discredit his nationalist and religious credentials.

This doesn’t undermine the central point of the post, however: Reagan had intended to publicly meet with and presumably praise Hekmatyar as a “freedom fighter” — the moniker he used to describe the mujahadin depicted in the photo — at the White House and had invited him there for that purpose. But it was Hekmatyar, whose use of terrorism over more than three decades is undisputed, who turned Reagan down.

A propos, did anyone notice the elevation (due in major part to pressure from western embassies in Kabul, according to the New York Times) of a former KHAD special forces officer, Hanif Atmar, to head the Interior Ministry under President Hamid Karzai? What goes around comes around; one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. In any event, I apologize for the mistaken identity.

I didn’t want the week to go by completely without noting the revealing interview given by Likud Party leader and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the Financial Times and published in its October 7 edition. The interview makes clear that Netanyahu, who, according to recent polls, would be the front-runner in Israel if new elections were held today, has no interest in a two-state solution and would prefer to lead his country and the Palestinian territories under its control into a de facto apartheid state, bantustans and all. To quote from the FT:

“…Mr. Netanyahu wants to see the West Bank divided into a collection of disconnected economic zones with dedicated business projects.

“The ancient town of Jericho, for instance, should capitalise on its proximity to the Jordan River to attract Baptist tourists from the US — a location which the hawkish leader of the Israeli opposition says is ‘easily worth tens of thousands of jobs.’”

“The Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu adds, would be allowed to hold on to their population centres. Other parts of the West Bank, such as the Judean desert and the Jordan Valley, should not leave Israeli control. ‘These areas are very significant for us because they are our strategic security belt,’ he says.

“…’It is not so much that peace brings prosperity – it is that prosperity brings peace,’ he says.”

All this sounds, of course, a lot like a recipe for setting up Bantustans. Instead of casinos in Sun City in Bophuthatswana, Netanyahu proposes Biblical tourism for Christian Zionists as a possible economic engine for Palestinian development.

Netanyahu goes on to offer his worldview, one that demonstrates clearly what the neo-conservatives have tried to do since 9/11 — subordinate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a “clash of civilizations” in which the U.S. and the West would naturally have to support Israel. Quoting again from the FT:

“Resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians …is a second-order issue for the Likud leader. ‘The issue for me is not the Palestinian problem. I think that conflict has been replaced by the battle between radical Islam and the western world,’ he says.” [Editor’s note: Is there any doubt that distribution of ‘Obsession’ in the U.S. and abroad serves Likud’s purposes exceptionally well?]

“Handing back control of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the Palestinians as part of a peace deal, argues Mr. Netanyahu, would strengthen the hand of Iran. ‘Any area we withdraw from will be taken over by Iran and its proxies,’ he claims, pointing to the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, last year. ‘Both Lebanon and Gaza have become Iranian bases and they would get a third one if we retreat from the West Bank.’”

So, if Netanyahu somehow regains the premiership and has sufficient political power (and U.S. backing) to follow through on his current views, the inevitable result will be a de facto apartheid Israel and, one way or another, the end of a state that is both Jewish and democratic. Indeed, the biggest threat to Israel’s existence clearly lies not with Iran and its allies, but rather from Netanyahu the Likud and those who support them abroad, particularly in the U.S.

Speaking of which, check out a bizarre story in the current issue of The Forward about a U.S. group called “Stand Up America” led by two retired U.S. generals who have retained a U.S. attorney to represent former Israeli defense minister Gen. Shaul Mofaz in any legal effort to reverse his defeat last month in the Kadima primary election by Tzipi Livni. Mofaz, of course, represents the right wing of the centrist party, although, historically, his views are virtually indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s, Mofaz’ former mentor in Likud. (It was Mofaz whose threats against Iran last spring contributed substantially to the biggest daily spike in the global price of oil in its historic rise through the summer.)

The two generals are Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely who have long advocated a military attack on Iran and have been members of the Iraq Policy Committee, a group that has lobbied hard (and so far unsuccessfully) for taking the cultish Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MeK) off the State Department’s terrorism and for providing it with loads of assistance as leader of the “democratic opposition” to the theocracy. Stand Up America, according to McInerny, is to “protect America and let people understand the danger of radical Islam and the seriousness of global jihad.”

“We do not want a government in Israel that will support appeasement,” McInerney told The Forward. “…We believe it is 1938 and everyone is going on, in denial.”

The two generals’ last trip to Israel was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

I attended a debate between Harvard Prof. Steven Walt and veteran neo-conservative and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Joshua Muravchik at the Nixon Center Thursday evening. Most notable for the unfortunately abbreviated time I was there was Muravchik’s certainty that “if McCain is president, there will be an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” The way he said this also conveyed that it could well be item number one on McCain’s agenda.

He also asserted that “McCain is by history more of a neo-con than Bush” (no quarrel there) and noted that his service as chair of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a creation and beneficiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), helped steer him in that direction. “I would expect from McCain policies (that) I would like,” he said just before his observation about McCain’s intentions vis-a-vis Iran.

I would have to take Muravchik’s prediction seriously given his long-time perch at AEI, McCain’s favorite foreign-policy think tank, and his long association with some of McCain’s closest advisers, including Robert Kagan with whom he has worked since their Central America days. (Incidentally, Kagan, as well as Abrams, may be vying for the National Security Advisor post in any McCain administration.) Of course, bombing Iran has been a devout and explicit wish on Muravchik’s part for nearly two years if not more, so this may be an example of wishful thinking, but I can’t help but believe his associations give him some real insight on this question. Kagan, however, has supported unconditional talks with Iraq if for no other reason than to strengthen the case for eventual military action.

McCain’s surrogates, Max Boot and Richard Williamson, told a gathering of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in Virginia last weekend that the Republican candidate, if elected, would not become actively engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and discourage Israeli-Syrian peace efforts, according to an important article by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s excellent Ron Kampeas. Consistent with my last post, Abrams’ influence on both McCain positions is apparent.

As noted by Kampeas, Williamson’s endorsement of those positions “signified how closely the McCain campaign has allied itself with neo-conservatives.” Frankly, the position of those foreign-policy realists who have endorsed McCain and who, according to the mainstream media, are supposed to be advising him — I’m thinking of James Baker or Richard Armitage as examples — is becoming increasingly untenable in this campaign.

Not terribly surprising, but I have it from a reliable source that Elliott Abrams, currently Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy who also heads the NSC’s Near East office, is regularly briefing the McCain campaign — Randy Scheunemann appears to be the main contact — and has told friends and colleagues that he is confident that he will get a top post in a McCain administration. Now, assuming Abrams is not talking through his hat, I very much doubt that a Democratic-majority Senate would confirm Abrams, who pleaded guilty to essentially lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, to any position that required confirmation (especially as long as Chris Dodd, who clashed frequently and bitterly with Abrams when the latter served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs under Reagan, remains alive). That would leave his current abode — the NSC — as his most likely destination. But he is already a deputy national security adviser. Does that mean that he thinks he will be THE Deputy National Security Adviser — in charge of the day-to-day operations of the NSC — or even THE National Security Adviser in the McCain White House?

Abrams is no fool, and his political instincts have always been very sharp, so, unless my informant is mistaken, I assume he has reason to feel confident about his future under McCain. If so, there can remain really very little doubt that McCain’s foreign policy will be thoroughly neo-conservative and very aggressive; a replay of Bush’s first term. After all, it was Abrams, backed by Cheney, who drove the isolation policy against Hamas (so much for democracy promotion!); it was Abrams who suggested to Israeli leaders that they extend the 2006 war with Hezbollah to Syria; it was Abrams who, for all practical purposes, undermined Rice’s efforts to get a Israel-Palestine framework agreement before Bush leaves office. Among many other things.