Home » Levitt Letter » Levitt Letter Extra News

By Joseph Klein
www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Israel once again is taking a risk for peace by planning to halt its Gaza offensive, even without any corresponding ceasefire commitment from Hamas. Israel is doing so on the basis of assurances presumably provided by the United States and Egypt to take effective measures to stop the arms smuggling into Gaza. Moreover, Israel is not withdrawing its troops right way. While the rocket attacks against the Israeli civilian population have considerably diminished since the start of Israel’s military campaign, Israel reserves the right to resume military action if the rocket launchings from Gaza do not stop completely.

Whether Israel is making a wise choice remains to be seen. Apparently Israel wanted to establish the facts on the ground as the basis for extracting its minimum conditions and not risk any softening of U.S. support with the change of administrations.

The cowardly Hamas leaders who reside comfortably in exile in Lebanon and Syria vow to fight on. They are the war criminals who sacrifice their own children to kill as many Jews as possible. Here are the words of the enemy Israel faces on its doorstep:

“The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: ‘Son, go and don’t be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews.’ He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: ‘My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son’…Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.”**

Undoubtedly, with the help of United Nations officials and an obliging mainstream media that publishes sensational photographs of human suffering in Gaza without asking what lies behind it, Hamas will continue to manipulate public opinion by painting Israel as the ruthless aggressor who must leave Gaza immediately without any conditions. That would give Hamas the kind of propaganda victory which Hezbollah enjoyed after Israel simply took the UN’s terms for ending the 2006 Lebanon war. Israel must not make that mistake again by worrying about false public impressions of its military tactics.

Of course, the truth is that Israel’s air force has pinpointed its targets as much as feasible in order to avoid civilian casualties. Its ground troops have turned away from potential enemy targets when they believed that civilian lives would be unnecessarily jeopardized. However, Israel cannot allow its soldiers to be fired on at will by Hamas terrorists who violate the basic laws of war by using civilians as human shields. Nor can Israel allow its own civilians to remain as sitting ducks for Hamas rocket attacks. As General Patton once said, “To halt under fire and not fire back is suicide.”

The UN General Assembly President, Miguel d´Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, has accused Israel of being “in contempt of international law and the United Nations”. In one sense, he is right but for the wrong reasons. Israel does have contempt for the United Nations’ one-sided response to its conflict with the Palestinian terrorists and it correctly ignores the UN’s resolutions when they are in contempt of the UN Charter by denying a member state the right to defend itself.

The General Assembly President has questioned Israel’s claim of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. He stated that if Israel’s right ever existed at all, it would last only “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security”. Of course, the Security Council took no such measures to ensure the end of rocket attacks and arms smuggling that triggered the conflict in the first place. Israel instead is expected to rely on diplomatic double-talk for its protection.

Oblivious to the fact that Israel unilaterally exited Gaza in 2005 to give peace a chance, which the ruling Hamas government has torpedoed altogether, Brockmann still brands Israel as the occupying power in Gaza. He has taken the side of the Hamas terrorists in demanding an immediate ceasefire and the complete re-opening of the border crossings with Gaza for all purposes without any pre-conditions. That would amount to national suicide for Israel since Hamas will be free to import more sophisticated arms for use against Israel and to send to Israel its homicidal bombers.

The realities on the ground have enabled Israel to reach the point of deciding to suspend combat, not the empty words from hypocrites like Brockmann who like to play the role of moralizer and peacemaker but are no more than shills for the terrorists.

It is time to place the spotlight of moral condemnation solely where it belongs – on Hamas and its fellow Islamic terrorist organizations. In her incisive interview with FrontPage Magazine published on January 16, 2009, terrorist expert and author Brigitte Gabriel explained how she is attempting to do just that. As she said, “Even the Nazis did not turn their own children into human bombs, and then rejoice at their deaths as well the deaths of their victims.” That is why her organization ACT! for America has launched a petition to the UN which calls for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “to end the UN’s silence and initiate a thorough UN investigation” into Hamas’s abuse of children in Gaza.

Many more actions like this are necessary even though it is easy to get discouraged when one sees the tide of uninformed international opinion turn so decisively against Israel with the help of so many influential voices. While the effort to counter with the truth sometimes feels like plugging holes in a very leaky dike, it must be done again and again in order not to let evil prevail.

By David E. Sanger www.NYTimes.com

President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.

Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.

The interviews also suggest that while Mr. Bush was extensively briefed on options for an overt American attack on Iran’s facilities, he never instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning, even during the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some critics have suggested.

The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.

Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.

The covert American program, started in early 2008, includes renewed American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.

Knowledge of the program has been closely held, yet inside the Bush administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not derailed, their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.

Late last year, international inspectors estimated that Iran had 3,800 centrifuges spinning, but American intelligence officials now estimate that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000, enough to produce about one weapon’s worth of uranium every eight months or so.

While declining to be specific, one American official dismissed the latest covert operations against Iran as “science experiments.” One senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have been dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the American effort was unlikely to prove effective.

www.NYDailyNews.com

The collateral damage that has been inflicted on the residents of Gaza is a sorrowful consequence of living under the rule of rocket-firing fanatics. It is because of Hamas, and only Hamas, that Palestinians are suffering.

At least some of them know the identity of their tormentors. A New York Times dispatch captured an excruciating moment that took place in a hospital morgue, where a mother had just found half of the body of her 17-year-old daughter.

“May God exterminate Hamas!” screamed the woman in crystal-clear understanding that the terrorist band’s reckless, inhuman actions had brought death to her child.

There will likely be more tragedies as Israel presses an assault on Hamas by air and, now, on the ground. Each will trace to Hamas’s refusal to desist, once and for all, from raining rockets onto Israeli soil. And, perversely, each will increase pressure on Israel to stand down prematurely.

Calls for a truce have mounted with the European Union, the secretary general of the UN, Arab countries, and others urging both sides to come to an immediate ceasefire.

Both sides? Let’s start with one: the bad actor.

All the world knows that Israel would give up the fight in the event Hamas stopped firing and agreed to verifiably disarm. Those terms are both the short-term fix and the long-term solution that the international community should be demanding.

Lacking either one, Israel is waging a high-risk, highly skilled operation to destroy Hamas’s capacity to lob missiles at will into Israeli territory, some with a range of 25 miles. The group’s arsenal is formidable.

More than 3,000 rockets hit Israel in 2008. More than 500 have struck since Hamas ended a “truce” on Dec. 19. And, 10 days into the offensive, Hamas was still able to fire several dozen, including one that blasted an empty kindergarten.

The weapons stores must be dismantled and Hamas’s supply routes — tunnels into Gaza from Egypt — must be shut, with oversight to prevent Hamas from rearming. Israel and the U.S. are properly seeking such terms.

Hamas’s unending barrage had forced hundreds of thousands to live in fear, yet the onslaught drew barely a fraction of the outrage now directed at Israel’s exercise of self-defense.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy went so far as to say, revoltingly, that Israel had hurt the cause of peace in the Mideast by sending ground troops into Gaza. There had been no peace — and there will be no peace until Hamas lacks the will and/or the way to attack.

Given no choice but to push in that direction, the Israeli military has done an extraordinary job of targeting Hamas fighters and arms in crowded environments — while holding down civilian casualties. It is up against demented enemies who sacrifice their own people…people such as the teenage girl whose mother’s prayer should only be answered.

By Dr Farrukh Saleem www.AmericanCongressForTruth.com
(The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance columnist)

Why are Jews so powerful?

There are only 14 million Jews in the world; 7 million in the Americas, 5 million in Asia, 2 million in Europe and 100,000 in Africa. For every single Jew in the world there are 100 Muslims. Yet, Jews are more than a hundred times more powerful than all the Muslims put together. Ever wondered why?

Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish. Albert Einstein, the most influential scientist of all time and TIME magazine’s ‘Person of the Century’, was a Jew. Sigmund Freud — id, ego, and superego — the father of psychoanalysis was a Jew. So were Karl Marx, Paul Samuelson, and Milton Friedman.

Here are a few other Jews whose intellectual output has enriched the whole humanity:

Benjamin Rubin gave humanity the vaccinating needle.
Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine.
Albert Sabin developed the improved live polio vaccine.
Gertrude Elion gave us a leukemia-fighting drug.
Baruch Blumberg developed the vaccination for Hepatitis B.
Paul Ehrlich discovered a treatment for syphilis.
Elie Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize in infectious diseases.
Bernard Katz won a Nobel Prize in neuromuscular transmission.

Andrew Schally won a Nobel in endocrinology (disorders of the endocrine system; diabetes, hyperthyroidism).
Aaron Beck founded Cognitive Therapy (psychotherapy to treat mental disorders, depression and phobias).
Gregory Pincus developed the first oral contraceptive pill.
George Wald won a Nobel for furthering our understanding of the human eye.

Stanley Cohen won a Nobel in embryology (study of embryos and their development). Willem Kolff came up with the kidney dialysis machine.

Over the past 105 years, 14 million Jews have won 15-dozen Nobel Prizes while only 3 Nobel Prizes have been won by 1.4 billion Muslims (other than Peace Prizes). Why are Jews so powerful?

Stanley Mezor invented the first micro-processing chip.
Leo Szilard developed the first nuclear chain reactor.
Peter Schultz, optical fibre cable;
Charles Adler, traffic lights;
Benno Strauss, Stainless steel;
Isador Kisee, sound movies;
Emile Berliner, telephone microphone and
Charles Ginsburg, videotape recorder.

Famous financiers in the business world who belong to Jewish faith include
Ralph Lauren (Polo),
Levis Strauss (Levi’s Jeans),
Howard Schultz (Starbuck’s),
Sergey Brin (Google),
Michael Dell (Dell Computers),
Larry Ellison (Oracle),
Donna Karan (DKNY),
Irv Robbins (Baskin & Robbins) and
Bill Rosenberg (Dunkin Donuts).

Richard Levin, President of Yale University, is a Jew. So are:

Henry Kissinger (American secretary of state),
Alan Greenspan (fed chairman under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush),
Joseph Lieberman, United States Senator,
Madeleine Albright (former American secretary of state),
Maxim Litvinov (USSR foreign Minister),
David Marshal (Singapore ‘s first chief minister),
Isaac Isaacs (governor-general of Australia),
Benjamin Disraeli (British statesman and author),
Yevgeny Primakov (Russian PM),
Jorge Sampaio (president of Portugal),
Herb Gray (Canadian deputy PM),
Pierre Mendes (French PM),
Michael Howard (British Home Secretary),
Bruno Kreisky (chancellor of Austria) and
Robert Rubin (former American Secretary of Treasury)

In the media, famous Jews include
Wolf Blitzer (CNN),
Barbara Walters (ABCNews),
Eugene Meyer (Washington Post),
Henry Grunwald (editor-in-chief TIME),
Katherine Graham (publisher of The Washington Post),
Joseph Lelyyeld (Executive editor, The New York Times), and Max Frankel (New York Times).

Can you name the most beneficent philanthropist in the history of the world?

The name is George Soros, a Jew, who has so far donated a colossal $4 billion most of which has gone as aid to scientists and universities around the world.

Second to George Soros is Walter Annenberg, another Jew, who has built a hundred libraries by donating an estimated $2 billion.

At the Olympics, Mark Spitz set a record of sorts by winning seven gold medals. Lenny Krayzelburg is a three-time Olympic gold medalist. Spitz, Krayzelburg and Boris Becker are all Jewish.

Did you know that Harrison Ford, George Burns, Tony Curtis, Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Paul Newman, Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, Kirk Douglas, William Shatner, Jerry Lewis, and Peter Falk are all Jewish?

As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself was founded by a Jew. Among directors and producers, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Oliver Stone, Aaron Spelling (Beverly Hills 90210), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Andrew Vaina (Rambo 1/2/3), Michael Man (Starsky and Hutch), Milos Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad), and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) are all Jewish.

To be certain, Washington is the capital that matters and in Washington the lobby that matters is The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Washington knows that if PM Ehud Olmert were to discover that the earth is flat, AIPAC will make the 109th Congress pass a resolution congratulating Olmert on his discovery.

William James Sidis, with an IQ of 250-300, is the brightest human who ever existed. Guess what faith did he belong to?

So, why are Jews so powerful?
Answer: Education.

Why are Muslims so powerless?

There are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and 6 million in the Americas. Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are 2 Muslims, for every Buddhist there are 2 Muslims and for every Jew there are 100 Muslims.

Ever wondered why Muslims are so powerless?
Here is why: There are 57 member-countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every 3 million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’, and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.

As per data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian-majority states have a literacy rate of 100 percent. A Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 percent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent.

Some 98 percent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 percent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same. Around 40 percent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world attended university while no more than 2 percent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.

Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million. In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs (in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million).

Furthermore, the Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around 5 per cent of its GDP.

Conclusion: The Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge.

Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society. In Pakistan, there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK, the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20.

Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge.

Exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. Pakistan’s exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one percent.

The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 per cent; Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria are all at 0.3 percent while Singapore is at 58 percent.

Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge.

Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren’t producing knowledge.
Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren’t diffusing knowledge.
Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren’t applying knowledge. And, the future belongs to knowledge-based societies.

Interestingly, the combined annual GDP of 57 OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) countries is under $2 trillion. America, just by itself, produces goods and services worth $12 trillion; China $8 trillion, Japan $3.8 trillion and Germany $2.4 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $500 billion; Spain alone produces goods and services worth over $1 trillion, Catholic Poland $489 billion, and Buddhist Thailand $545 billion.

(Muslim GDP as a percentage of world GDP is fast declining).

So, why are Muslims so powerless?
Answer: Lack of education!
All we do is shout to Allah all day and blame everyone else for our multiple failures…

By David Harris www.JPost.com

If all we knew about Israel came from the media, how would the country be portrayed? Images of war, conflict, corruption, and domestic fault lines would dominate.

And if all we knew about Israel came from international organizations, which make a habit of singling it out for vilification — especially when Israel’s very creation becomes an annual target for its enemies at the UN — what would we see? A nonstop litany of accusations of every conceivable evil known to humankind.

For many, these are the only sources of information about Israel. But anyone who’s been to Israel understands that the real place, seen up close, is quite different. That’s why there’s no substitute for a first-hand look.

Okay, Israel isn’t perfect. It has its share of problems. But what country — even among the most highly developed in the world — doesn’t have its shortcomings? And no one else faces the unique security challenges, with all the stresses and strains, which are Israel’s daily fare.

That said, Israel’s got an awful lot going for it — robust democracy, cutting-edge innovation, thriving arts, astonishing diversity, and no-holds-barred debate.

Above all, it has a zest for life.

You don’t have to believe me. Confirmation comes from an unlikely source, Sheikh Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, although he draws rather different conclusions.

He declared, “We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

This love of life isn’t just about hedonism or narcissism, though, of course, Israelis aren’t immune.

It’s about something more. The Israeli zest for life derives from the Jewish interpretation of the meaning of life — namely, inspired by a higher authority, to be agents of change for a more humane and compassionate planet. It’s about the oft-cited Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or healing the world.

Some have argued that Israelis would be justified if they turned inward, circled the wagons, and said to hell with a world that hasn’t always treated either Jews or Israel fairly. And they argue that Israel, as the only UN member nation targeted with annihilation by both state and non-state actors, could be excused if it succumbed to total self-preoccupation in the interest of self-preservation.

Yet these views don’t prevail. There’s an irrepressible Israeli yearning to engage the world and make it better.

And herein lies a window into Israel’s soul, which may not be the stuff of media coverage or UN resolutions, but reveals an all-too-rare inner truth.

One particularly striking example. Remember the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who were kidnapped across an international border by Hezbollah in 2006, triggering a war that summer? They were wounded when abducted, but very much alive. In 2008, their corpses were returned to Israel in a so-called swap.

In contrast, among those sent back to Lebanon was Samir Kuntar, a Hezbollah terrorist captured by Israel after he killed a four-year-old Israeli girl and her father in 1978. The details of the murders, according to Newsweek, were “so sickening they give pause even to some of Israel’s enemies.” These barbaric acts, for which he has never apologized, earned him a hero’s welcome upon his arrival to Beirut.

Not only was Kuntar returned alive — Israel has no capital punishment, even in such grisly cases — but he came back to Lebanon with a bachelor’s degree in hand, courtesy of the Open University in Israel!

Yes, Sheikh Nasrallah is right in one respect — Jews love life, and not just for themselves. With its humanitarian spirit and pioneering medical research and technology, Israel is a small country making an outsized difference on the world stage in advancing the quality of life.

But Nasrallah also believes that the cult of death has the upper hand. Here, he couldn’t be more wrong.

In truth, the affirmation of life, as embodied by Israel, will always triumph over an ideology grounded in murder and mayhem.

Consider some striking examples:
Wherever disaster strikes in the world, a group called Israeli Flying Aid is ready to respond. Made up of hundreds of volunteers who donate their time, it goes at a moment’s notice to places near and far that have been struck by earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, and political violence. The goal is to distribute food and medicine, provide first-aid assistance, and offer other survival help.

These volunteers are active in countries that have ties with Israel — and those that don’t. Often, their work is below the radar because countries accept their help, knowing the level of experience and professionalism, but, sadly, don’t want it known that it’s being provided by Israelis. But that public rejection has never been a deal-breaker for the group because lives hang in the balance. And sometimes they risk their own well-being to provide relief without government approval.

Or take Save A Child’s Heart, another completely volunteer effort. Based at the Wolfson Medical Center, near Tel Aviv, a team of dozens of top-flight medical personnel treat children with major cardiac problems from around the world, including the West Bank and Arab countries, and also train personnel in other lands to perform surgery.

Or consider Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, which I had occasion to visit recently. Stand in the entrance or walk its corridors. From secular Jews to devout Muslims, all patients receive outstanding care. And if you probe, you’ll discover that some of those patients are from countries that not only have no ties to Israel, but even regularly accuse the Jewish state of infecting Arabs with deadly viruses. Yet their citizens find round-about ways to reach Israel and benefit from its lifesaving health care.

Which brings us to the 13-year-old boy whose parents brought him to Israel after doctors in Iran, their native land, and Turkey were unable to treat his life-threatening brain tumor. Their names haven’t been revealed for fear of retribution once they return to Iran, a country that calls for a world without Israel. But there they were at Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer counting on quality care to save a life — and getting it.

Or take the aftermath of a recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem, where the wounded Israeli was transported to the same hospital as his Palestinian assailant, who was shot by police, in an effort to save both their lives.

Visit Hebrew University, where the thirty-fourth class of students studying for a master’s degree in public health was recently welcomed.

The overwhelming majority of the students, many already physicians or health-care professionals, come from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They receive full stipends from Jewish foundations to get their degrees. When they complete the program, they are far better equipped to improve public health and, yes, save lives.

And at this moment, courtesy of Israel, a large group of African physicians is in the country for an annual program of advance training. They come from across the continent, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, and they’re spending several months acquiring new medical skills, once again, to save lives.

Last month, a group of twenty-five students from two Israeli medical schools, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, traveled for two weeks at their own expense to Ethiopia to volunteer in health agencies. Their goal, driven purely by idealism, was to help with de-worming efforts, especially in HIV/AIDS patients.

And one last particularly striking example. Remember the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who were kidnapped across an international border by Hezbollah in 2006, triggering a war that summer? They were wounded when abducted, but very much alive. Earlier this year, their corpses were returned to Israel in a so-called swap.

In contrast, among those sent back to Lebanon was Samir Kuntar, a Hezbollah terrorist captured by Israel after he killed a four-year-old Israeli girl and her father in 1978. The details of the murders, according to Newsweek, were “so sickening they give pause even to some of Israel’s enemies.” These barbaric acts, for which he has never apologized, earned him a hero’s welcome upon his arrival to Beirut.

Not only was Kuntar returned alive — Israel, after all, has no capital punishment, even in such grisly cases — but he came back to Lebanon with a bachelor’s degree in hand, courtesy of the Open University in Israel!

Yes, Sheikh Nasrallah is right in one respect — Jews love life, and not just for themselves. With its humanitarian spirit and pioneering medical research and technology, Israel is a small country making an outsized difference on the world stage in advancing the quality of life.

But Nasrallah also believes that the cult of death has the upper hand. Here, he couldn’t be more wrong.

In truth, the affirmation of life, as embodied by Israel, will always triumph over an ideology grounded in murder and mayhem.

By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich The Jerusalem Post

The war in Gaza has not slowed down the work of Save a Child’s Heart (SACH), the voluntary organization based at Holon’s Wolfson Medical Center that has provided free cardiac surgery to over 600 Palestinians and nearly 2,000 others from around the world.

A three-week-old baby named Jafar from Gaza underwent surgery on the last Sunday in December, two days after Israel’s air strikes on Gaza were launched.

Dr. Lior Sasson, SACH’s chief surgeon, has done so many operations in recent weeks that he can hardly keep track. Jafar, he said, would almost surely have died quickly after birth because he was born with a severe congenital heart defect, the transposition of the great arteries.

“Tomorrow we hope to take out the drainage tube. He is a very sweet baby. We don’t care if he comes from a Hamas family or what. He is a baby,” he said.

In December alone, the SACH staff of 70 – including five physicians – performed lifesaving surgery on 10 children from Gaza. “It is not difficult to get them here. We have a well-oiled operation, and the security forces know us well. There are no problems, even during a war,” Sasson said.

Jafar was accompanied by his grandmother; Sasson conversed with her with the small amount of Arabic he knows.

SACH (www.saveachildsheart.org) was founded by the late Dr. Amram (Ami) Cohen, a pediatric heart surgeon who came on aliya from the U.S. in 1992 and quickly established the organization, which he turned into an important contributor to children’s health worldwide. He joined Wolfson’s staff and served as the deputy chief of cardiovascular surgery and head of pediatric cardiac surgery.

In 1988, while serving in the U.S. armed forces in Korea, the head of the international organization Save the Hearts approached him. The organization was sending orphaned and indigent Korean children to Western countries for medical care not available locally. Cohen was so impressed with the idea that he requested and received permission from his superiors to participate in the program, and during the rest of his time in Korea, performed 35 pediatric cardiac surgeries. Cohen died in a tragic accident while climbing the Kilimanjaro Mountain in 2001.

“Ami would be very proud of us that we are continuing what he started by operating on young children from Gaza,” Sasson concluded. Despite the world financial crisis, SACH is still able to attract donations with which the organization is able to continue.

By Robert Spencer, Director of jihad Watch
www.humanevents.com

“We in Europe want a ceasefire as quickly as possible, and…everyone understands that time is running against peace. The guns must fall silent.” So said French President Nicholas Sarkozy after meeting with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Later, a delegation from the European Union met with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to ask Israel to cease operations in Gaza immediately. Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, which currently has leadership of the EU, declared that Israel should not wait for victory: “We are not sharing the view that the cease-fire is only possible if all possible aims of the Israeli action are achieved.”

Israel’s chief aim is to stop the rocket attacks into southern Israel from Gaza and prevent them from recurring. Islamic jihadists have fired 5000 rockets into Israel in the last three years, making no effort whatsoever to distinguish between civilian and military targets. Israeli civilians in southern Israel have grown accustomed to the daily possibility of death from the sky. Sarkozy and the EU expect the Israelis to stop short of achieving their simple goal of ending this threat because they are placing their hope on a negotiated settlement between Hamas and Israel — one that they would perhaps broker.

But what state has ever successfully reached a negotiated settlement with a jihadist enemy who avows a religious obligation to destroy it? And why is Israel constantly expected to be the first? Sarkozy, Schwarzenberg, and all those who are calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations seem to have forgotten (if they ever knew in the first place) what Hamas is, what its goals are, and who forms its leadership.

Many analysts continue to view Hamas (which name is an Arabic acronym for the “Islamic Resistance Movement”) as a nationalist group that will ultimately be pacified once a Palestinian state is set up. And to be sure, the Hamas Charter of August 1988 addresses nationalism, but not quite in those terms. It declares: “nothing is loftier or deeper in nationalism than waging jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims.” When will this jihad end? The Hamas Charter quotes Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

In saying that “Islam” will eliminate Israel, Hamas, which identifies itself in the Charter as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine chapter, echoes another Muslim Brotherhood document — one in which the organization vows to work in America toward “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion” — that is, Islam — “is made victorious over all other religions.” That is a political statement, not solely a religious one: it is a declaration of intent to bring Islamic law, sharia, to America, and enforce here its codified discrimination against women and non-Muslims, and its denial of the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience.

Yet at the same time, it is a religious statement, like those in the Hamas Charter. The fact that those who are waging jihad warfare against Israel and the United States believe that they are carrying out divine commands ensures that neither jihad will end with changes in economic conditions, or with a negotiated settlement. While Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has indicated a willingness to enter into a long-term truce with Israel, he also told Iranian supremo Ali Khamenei in May 2008, “the Palestinian nation will continue its resistance despite all pressures and will not under any circumstances stop its jihad.”

Was Meshaal, then, simply lying when he declared his openness to a truce? Not at all — but his call must be understood in light of his own frame of reference, not a Western one to which he does not subscribe. In the West, nations enter into truces with one another because they are weary of war and value peace. No such concept of truce exists in the Islamic law that Hamas and Meshaal accept as their supreme guide. In traditional and authoritative Islamic law, a Muslim force may agree to a truce with a non-Muslim enemy only if the Muslims reasonably expect that their opponents are prepared to convert to Islam, or if the Muslims are weak and need time to gather their strength to fight again more effectively. It is the latter concept to which Hamas has been having recourse in its short-term truces with Israel: it uses the cessation of hostilities as an opportunity to get back on its feet, and then the rockets start once again raining down upon Israel.

The EU and the UN, and all those calling upon Israel to enter into another truce, should take careful note of that fact. Hamas has never hidden its intention to destroy Israel. Israel should not be impeded in its necessary struggle to destroy Hamas.

By Charles Krauthammer
www.JewishWorldReview.com

Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.
— Associated Press, Dec. 27

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.

Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.

This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage — or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb — will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.

For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous. And deeply perverse, such as the Hamas TV children’s program in which an adorable live-action Palestinian Mickey Mouse is beaten to death by an Israeli (then replaced by his more militant cousin, Nahoul the Bee, who vows to continue on Mickey’s path to martyrdom).

At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible — also on both sides. It’s a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.

That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza — peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.

What ensued? This is not ancient history. Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza’s Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base — importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.

The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel’s very existence.

Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world’s opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire — exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d’etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.

Israel’s only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence — the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.

Hamas’s rejection of an extension of its often-violated six-month cease-fire (during which the rockets never stopped, just were less frequent) gave Israel a rare opportunity to establish the norm it should have insisted upon three years ago: no rockets, no mortar fire, no kidnapping, no acts of war. As the U.S. government has officially stated: a sustainable and enduring cease-fire. If this fighting ends with anything less than that, Israel will have lost yet another war. The question is whether Israel still retains the nerve — and the moral self-assurance — to win.

www.WorldNetDaily.com

By Dore Gold
www.JewishWorldReview.com

Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.

The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever Israel has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel’s current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.

Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were “security forces,” and Palestinian officials said “at least 15 civilians were among the dead.” The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made “to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage – but is directed at a target with very large military value – would be lawful.”

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court “permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.” The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).

After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda’s attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.

Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.

Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack

There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.

Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million. Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba. The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel. On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.

Critical Voices

On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized “Israel’s security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza,” he reiterated “Israel’s obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law.” The statement specifically noted that he “condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added].”

A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel’s “disproportionate use of force,” while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel. Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel’s “disproportionate response.” Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.

Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians

The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever Israel has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel’s current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).

When international legal experts use the term “disproportionate use of force,” they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality “cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury – it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression.” In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander’s intent regarding collateral civilian damage.

What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were “security forces,” and Palestinian officials said “at least 15 civilians were among the dead.” It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.

During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: “If someone punches you in the nose, you don’t burn down their house.” He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.

What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made “to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage – but is directed at a target with very large military value – would be lawful.” Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.

Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court “permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.” The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when “the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage.” In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.

Proportionality as a Strategic Issue

Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.

This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: “Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced.” Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing “its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children.”

The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda’s attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.

Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?

And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of “Israel’s disproportionate use of force,” while NATO armies take pride in their “kill ratios” against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.

The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel’s responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: “When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible – and no one else is – for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire.”

International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict – Hamas – and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression – Israel.