Levitt Letter Extra News

By CAMERA staff

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, www.camera.org

 

In the January 25th episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes entitled “Is Peace Out of Reach,” correspondent Bob Simon teamed up with Palestinian politician and partisan Mustafa Barghouti to promote the Palestinian view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, heaping blame on Israel and exculpating the Palestinians for the absence of peace. In a caricature of Israeli villainy and Palestinian victimhood Simon presented a simple fable: a two-state solution, the key to peace, is thwarted by stubborn Israeli settlers.

 

Palestinian speakers were joined by a like-minded Israeli critic, while an Israeli settler leader whose views represent neither the Israeli mainstream, the Israeli government nor even most settlers was cast as the primary obstacle to peace. But the program itself was much more lopsided than even the imbalance of speakers indicates, since correspondent Bob Simon — whose voice dominates the segment — clearly and continuously joined the “blame Israel” chorus.

 

While echoing Palestinian talking points and repeating without challenge anti-Israel propaganda — including the slur that Israel practices apartheid and that settlements are like “crusader fortresses”— Simon overlooked recent history and even heckled an Israeli soldier as if in a schoolyard argument. (“Have you lost your voice?” he contemptuously asked an Israeli soldier who was seemingly not authorized or prepared to speak with the press.)

 

Simon laid down his distorted storyline at the outset of the segment, declaring: “a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank, where Palestinians had hoped to create their state.”

 

Actually, most Israelis would say — given recent experience with peacemaking attempts — that “lasting peace really depends” on Palestinians accepting Israel as a legitimate and permanent neighbor and not continuing to hope for and seek Israel’s elimination from the region. But this view held by Israelis was absent from the program.

 

Nor, in this vein, was there any mention that Palestinians were offered the two-state solution sixty years ago, and again eight years ago when they not only rejected the Camp David/Taba peace offer, but chose a terror war against Israel instead. Had they accepted the offer, Palestinians would have a state, settlements deep inside the West Bank would be gone, and, the hope was, Palestinian terrorism would have ceased. Instead, the eruption of unprecedented Palestinian terrorism prompted Israeli defensive measures that altered the face of the West Bank.

 

None of this crucial information appeared in the segment.

 

Simon also failed to remind viewers of the other recent Israeli effort to reduce violence and enhance peace — the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Israel removed every citizen and dismantled every settlement and got, in return, not peace but more rockets and mortars than ever.

 

Does Simon think Israel is required to undertake withdrawal from areas close to Israel’s major cities and congested heartland without considering the possibility of more violent aggression against its people?

 

Why does he ignore reasonable Israeli concerns that if it withdrew from the West Bank “Hamas would take over the institutions and apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority within days”?

 

Does Simon think recent history is irrelevant? Does he think omitting essential facts (and substituting a fable) is ethical journalism?

 

BLAMELESS PALESTINIANS

 

Just as Simon ignored Israel’s offer to dismantle settlements and create a Palestinian state, he also ignored the violence that followed Palestinian rejection of the offer. The words “terror,” “terrorism” or “terrorist” do not appear even once in the transcript of the segment. Nor do the words “violence,” “war,” “gunmen,” “militants,” “attacker,” or “suicide bombers.”

 

The one reference to guns during the 60 Minutes segment, in fact, was Simon’s assertion that “the Israelis,” as opposed to the Palestinians, “have the guns.” The one reference to “security” was Mustafa Barghouti’s claim that most Israeli checkpoints cannot be justified by security concerns.

 

Although Simon ignored Palestinian violence against Israel, he nonetheless faulted Israeli response to the violence. Stripped of its context, Israel’s attempts to protect its civilians were framed as gratuitously causing inconvenience, oppression, and “humiliation” to Palestinians.

 

The security barrier (which Simon absurdly says Israel refers to as a “wall”) was said to “appropriate” land and “separat[e] farmers from their land.” But its essential purpose, to protect Israelis and prevent suicide bombers from reaching their targets, was ignored. Likewise, Simon described checkpoints as “humiliating,” and allowed Barghouti to allege that they primarily exist “to block the movement of people from one place to another,” but failed to reference the number of Palestinian attacks they’ve prevented, and failed to mention that, like the barrier, most checkpoints didn’t exist before the Palestinians initiated their war of terror in late 2000.

 

Moreover, the checkpoints continue to serve the purpose for which they’re intended, foiling infiltrations and terrorist attacks.CAMERA recently examined incidents at the Hawara checkpoint over the course of one month, October 2008.

• On October 5, a Palestinian was stopped carrying a suspicious parcel containing two pipe bombs;
• On October 12, a female soldier prevented an attack when she discovered nine pipe bombs in the bags of three Palestinian traveling companions;
• On the following day, soldiers stopped a man who was trying to cross the checkpoint with explosive devices. He was shot and lightly wounded as he tried to escape in a get-away car;
• On October 15, soldiers confiscated a 10 cm knife from a man trying to pass through the checkpoint;
• A week later on October 22, the checkpoint was temporarily closed as a 17-year-old youth was detained with several firebombs and an explosive device.
• On October 25, a Palestinian youth was taken for questioning after soldiers found a pipe bomb in his bag.)

Evidently for Simon it’s not “humiliating” for Israel to have to be on guard constantly against Palestinians with bombs and kives trying to kill men, women and children.

 

IN NABLUS, TOO, ONLY ISRAELIS TO BLAME

Simon seemed to relish in particular a segment focused on Israel’s periodic military requisitioning of a Palestinian home for apparent surveillance use in Nablus. The Nassif home is set on the heights overlooking the town and provides a unique vantage from which Israel can monitor ongoing terrorist efforts in the district. Casting the military use of the private home of the Nassif’s as an outrage, the CBS correspondent did almost nothing to present the Israeli position, saying only that “an army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassif’s house for important surveillance operations.”

 

There was not a word in the segment to indicate the gravity of what Israel faces in maintaining the relative quiet that has prevailed since it was compelled to counter the terrorist upsurge after the collapse of the Camp David talks. For Israel Nablus remains a hotbed of terrorist efforts and the central district of the West Bank from which attempted attacks on Israel emanate.

 

According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, in 2007 “the Hamas networks in Samaria, especially in the Nablus region, were defined by the Israel Security Agency as dangerous and working avidly to rehabilitate themselves after the damage done by Operation Defensive Shield. In 2007 a series of counter-terrorist activities was directed against the networks including the detention of many operatives, some of them senior.” (See, e.g.,  here, here and here.)

 

The terrorist activity and murder of hundreds of Israelis in 2001-2003 has been dramatically diminished through a combination of the security barrier and intense, round-the-clock vigilance inside the West Bank.

 

Because much of Nablus lies in a valley, Israel can survey the camps, casbah and city below from strategic hills, and this surveillance sometimes entails using private homes that provide the best vantage point. IDF soldiers are instructed not to harm anyone or to damage property.

 

Even the BBC, which is not generally regarded as sympathetic to Israel, alerted its readers to Israel’s position in a more journalistically responsible manner. In a piece about the house, a reporter notes:

 

Over the last six years, the Israeli army has made frequent incursions into the city, to arrest and kill militants. When it does, the soldiers often return to bang on Mr Nasif’s door. …

 

Nablus does have a history of militancy. In the past, perpetrators of bombings in which Israeli civilians were killed, came from the city.

 

Although those attacks have dramatically decreased in number over recent years, the army says that does not mean attacks are not still being planned. That is why it says it needs to keep on making its raids into Nablus.

 

In other words, unlike 60 Minutes, the BBC acknowledges that the murder of Israeli civilians, and Israel’s attempts to act against potential killers, is an essential part of the story.

 

JERUSALEM ARABS

 

As with his discussion of the West Bank, Simon grossly misled viewers regarding Palestinians in Jerusalem:

 

The army is evicting Arabs from their homes in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hoped to make their capital. Outraged, Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis have the guns. Israel demolished more than 100 Arab homes in the past year, ruling they’d been illegally built. Arabs say this is just another tactic to drive them out.

 

“Drive them out”? Under Israeli control, the Arab population of Jerusalem has increased dramatically, and in fact grew substantially faster than the Jewish population of Jerusalem.

 

Additionally, Israel also demolishes illegal Jewish structures in Jerusalem. Does this mean it is trying to “drive out” Jews from Jerusalem? And Palestinians themselves have demolished illegal homes under their control. Would CBS take seriously allegations that the Palestinian Authority is trying to “drive out” Palestinians from Gaza because it has demolished illegal building there — which it has?

 

ECHOING FALSE PALESTINIAN CLAIMS

 

Simon’s use of loaded, anti-Israel language was uninhibited. Here is one typical statement by the correspondent:

 

Palestinians had hoped to establish their state here on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have sliced it up with scores of settlements and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive or ride on the older roads. When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.

 

In just this few seconds of monologue:

• Simon falsely asserted that there are “hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use.” In fact, all Israelis, whether Jewish or Arab, Christian or Muslim, can use Israel’s bypass roads, as can West Bank Palestinians who are believed to pose no threat to commuters.
• He claimed absurdly that Israelis were preventing a Palestinian state because they “sliced … up” the West Bank (in fact, as mentioned above, the lack of a Palestinian state is not because Israel “sliced up” — as Bob Simon and pro-Palestinian activists describe it — the West Bank, but because they rejected a state, started a terror war, and used territory abandoned by Israel as a base for deadly attacks).
• He also relayed unfiltered the Palestinian view of checkpoints as “humiliating” while ignoring the fact that Palestinians’ violent rejection of a state prompted most of the checkpoints.

 

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

 

Mustapha Barghouti was quoted and paraphrased more than any other guest and given an unchallenged platform to level a variety of extreme charges. Referring to him only as a “former candidate for Palestinian president” Simon gave no hint that he is a long-time partisan whose statements are often patently false and propagandistic – notwithstanding his role as a PA legislator.

 

* Commenting on the death of arch-terrorist George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and mastermind of bombings and hijackings, the Lod Airport massacre and the Entebbe hijacking, Barghouti praised the PFLP leader who, he said, left a legacy of “loyalty to the Palestinian cause in a very principled manner – honest, clean politics and great devotion to the Palestinian cause and to humanity.” (Jerusalem Post Jan 29, 2008)

 

* On Dec 30, as the Gaza conflict erupted, he stated on CNN that not a “single” Israeli had been killed since Dec 27, when in fact four had been killed.

 

* On CNN, he charged that Israel had broken the June 2008 ceasefire, when the Palestinians had broken it repeatedly with the firing of rockets, mortars, and light arms and with attempted infiltrations aimed at abducting Israelis.

 

* Barghouti’s lies sometimes catch up with him as, for example, when the San Francisco Chronicle had to correct an absurd allegation he made that Israel’s security barrier “was claiming 58% of the West Bank.”

 

Barghouti and Simon together dramatically lament that Barghouti cannot “ever” enter Jerusalem, implying he’s barred because he moved away from the city. Unmentioned was the fact that Barghouti has been arrested several times for violating agreements not to engage in political electioneering in Jerusalem without a permit, and according to London’s Independent (Jan. 8, 2005), he has deliberately “sought confrontations with the security forces as a tactic to gain badly needed publicity.” Moreover, after an arrest in January 2006, he was ordered by Jerusalem police to stay out of Jerusalem for the next 30 days (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 4, 2006) — not as Simon claims “forever.” Apparently, the story is more complicated than the 60 Minutes host implies.

 

The Nassif family is granted almost as much time as Barghouti to give their view of events at their home overlooking Nablus, a sharp contrast with the ultra-brief, paraphrased Israeli comment that “important surveillance operations” occur from the house.

 

Daniella Weiss, resident of the West Bank, is presented as a counterweight to Barghouti and voice for the settlement movement. Yet she represents the most extreme position of Israeli settler opinion, has sparred with settler leadership, and advocates for illegal settler outposts – all of which are not positions of the vast majority of Israelis and Israeli settlers. Casting her comments as representative produces a highly distorted picture of settlements, ignoring the relevant legal, historical, and religious issues.

 

Meron Benvenisti is identified as a supposedly “moderate” Israeli; but his stated views are far from moderate. He claims Israelis are not actually victims of Arab violence, but that “Jewish immigrants settled on the lands of Arab natives, met with violent resistance, and responded as if they were the victims and the natives the aggressors” (The Nation, June 18, 2007). In the August 7, 2003 Ha’aretz, he wrote: “… the basic story here is not one of two national movements that are confronting each other; the basic story is that of natives and settlers.” (Like Hamas extremists, he uses “settlers” here to refer to all Israelis, not just those living in the West Bank.)

 

He even claims Israel is worse in some respects than apartheid South Africa and he argues for a single bi-national state over the entirety of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip — a proposal far outside the Israeli political mainstream.

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is very briefly interviewed, representing the official voice of Israel. She is only quoted discussing the possible need to remove settlements. If she commented on the need for checkpoints and other security measures or other context, it didn’t make it on the air.

 

Never is there a good time for shoddy reporting, but today when Israel is under intense political pressure and Jews around the world are encountering heightened anti-Semitism, Simon’s biased, inaccurate blast at Israel is especially reprehensible and deserving of public protest.

 

 

 

——————————————————————————–

 

Transcript:

 

CBS 60 Minutes, January 25, 2009

BOB SIMON, co-host:

 

Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the cease-fire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank, where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by.

 

(Map of area)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state. It’s known as the two-state solution. But while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can’t have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.

 

(Workers in field)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement.

 

Mayor DANIELLA WEISS: I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal, and this is the reality.

 

(Man and son working in field; government officials; desert; doctor caring for patient)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Though settlers and Palestinians don’t agree on anything, most do agree now that a peace deal has been overtaken by events. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is a former candidate for Palestinian president.

 

Dr. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: While my heart still wants to believe that the two-state solution is possible, my brain keeps telling me the opposite because of what I see in terms of the building of settlements. So in a way, these settlers are destroying the potential peace for both people that would have been created if we had two-state solution.

 

(Tanks; wounded; men carrying children; fire and smoke)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) And he told us Israel’s invasion of Gaza, all the death and destruction, convinces him that Israel does not want a two-state solution.

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I am very worried that what Israel has done has furthered us much further from the possibility of two-state solution.

 

(Sheep herder and sheep; aerial view of settlement; highways; men in car; man riding donkey; women and children walking; woman’s credentials being checked by soldier; people waiting at checkpoint)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Palestinians had hoped to establish their state here on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have sliced it up with scores of settlements and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive or ride on the older roads. When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.

 

Why do the Israelies have so many checkpoints?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of them can be justified because they say it’s for security. But I think the vast majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to another.

 

(Building; photo of young Barghouti with siblings; photo of Barghouti as a doctor; town; Barghouti working on computer)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Here’s how they block Dr. Barghouti. He was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Jerusalem, and worked in a hospital there for 14 years. Four years ago, he moved to a town just 10 miles away. But now, because he no longer lives in Jerusalem, he can’t get back in, ever.

 

Now, wait a minute. You cannot go to Jerusalem?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: At all.

 

SIMON: Can’t you get a permit to go?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I asked for a permit to go to Jerusalem during the last year–the last two years about 16 times, and 16 times they were rejected. Like most Palestinians, I don’t have a permit to go to the city I was born in, to the city I used to work in, to the city where my sister lives.

 

(Aerial view of settlements; Simon riding in helicopter; house)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Here’s what he’s up against–scores of Israeli settlements dominating the lowlands like crusader fortresses. Many are little cities, and none of them existed 40 years ago. The Israelis always take the high ground, sometimes the hills, sometimes the homes. And sometimes, Arabs are occupied inside their own homes. This house, for example, the highest house on the highest hill overlooking the town of Nablus. We learned that Israeli soldiers often corral the four families who live here and take over the house to monitor movement down below.

 

We’re going into an apartment owned by a Mr. Nassif here in Nablus. We understand that Israeli soldiers came in this morning, and without any notice, without any invitation, came into the apartment and have been there ever since.

 

Mr. ABDUL NASSIF: We cannot speak with you. There are soldiers.

 

SIMON: There are soldiers?

 

Mr. NASSIF: Yes.

 

SIMON: What are they doing here?

 

Mr. NASSIF: We are in prison here.

 

SIMON: Well, what’s happening?

 

Mr. NASSIF: They are keeping us here, and the soldiers are upstairs. We cannot move, we cannot speak with you.

 

SIMON: You can’t leave the house?

 

Mr. NASSIF: No.

 

SIMON: They told you that?

 

Mr. NASSIF: Yes. I can’t leave.

 

SIMON: How long are they going to stay?

 

Mr. NASSIF: I don’t know.

 

SIMON: Are they paying you any money?

 

Mr. NASSIF: You are kidding.

 

SIMON: I’m kidding.

 

(Nassif talking with Simon)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Abdul Nassif, a bank manager, said he had to get to his bank to open the safe but that soldiers won’t let him go. He told us, when the soldiers come, they wake everybody up and herd them into a kitchen for hours while soldiers sleep in their bedrooms. They can’t leave or use the phone or let us in. He sent us downstairs to see if his brother would open the door so we could ask the soldiers why they keep taking over this house.

 

Unidentified Man #1: You want to come?

 

SIMON: Yes. Just open the door and then…

 

Man #1: The soldiers close the door from the keys. They take the keys.

 

(House; Simon talking to house occupants through gate; occupants and soldiers inside house)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) So we left, and that night, so did the soldiers. But when we returned two days later, the soldiers were back for more surveillance. This time, they kept the women under house arrest, but let the men go to work and the children go to school. When the children returned, we caught a glimpse of two armed soldiers at the top of the stairs. Then, more children came home, but the soldiers wouldn’t open the door again.

 

Unidentified Man #2: They say if you don’t go back behind the wall, the children will not enter the house.

 

SIMON: But this is where the children live.

 

Unidentified Soldier: Yeah, but you need to go away from the door so I can let the children come in, OK?

 

SIMON: Who are you?

 

Man #2: He’s a commander here.

 

SIMON: He’s a commander here?

 

Man #2: Yeah.

 

SIMON: Can we talk to you?

 

Soldier: No.

 

SIMON: But we are talking to you now. Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing here? Have you lost your voice?

 

Well, they’ve closed the door now. They’ve closed the window. So I guess, if the children are going to get home, we have to–we have to leave, so that’s what we’ll do.

 

An army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassifs’ house for important surveillance operations. The Nassifs told us the soldiers usually stay for a day or two, always coming and going in the middle of the night. When they do go, the Nassifs never know when they’ll be occupied again. It could be tomorrow, next week or next month. The only certainty, they say, is that the soldiers will be back.

 

(Men talking and walking on streets; building under construction; aerial view of settlement; workers; Israelis; man praying; women; children playing)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Another crippling reality on the West Bank is high unemployment, now about 20 percent. So some Palestinians can only find jobs building Israeli settlements. They’re so ashamed to work here that they asked us not to show their faces. The settlers now number about 280,000, and as they keep moving in, their population keeps growing about 5 percent every year But the two and a half million Arabs have their strategy, too. They’re growing bigger families.

 

Demographers predict that within 10 years, Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state, the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank. They could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option, but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could inflict apartheid, have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians. But apartheid regimes don’t have a very long life.

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: Unfortunately, and I have to say to you that apartheid is already in place.

 

SIMON: Apartheid is already in place?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: Absolutely.

 

(Aerial view of wall; soldiers at checkpoint; fountain; rocky, arid ground; Israelis at cafe; Meron Benvenisti walking with Simon)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates 8 percent of the West Bank. Not only that, it weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not. Moderate Israelis who deplore the occupation used to believe passionately in a two-state solution. No longer. Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem.

 

Israeli leaders and Palestinian leaders are negotiating a two-state solution. What do you think the prospects are?

 

Mr. MERON BENVENISTI: Prospects are nil. The geopolitical condition that’s been created in ‘67 is irreversible, cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg.

 

SIMON: Does this mean that the settlers have won?

 

Mr. BENVENISTI: Yes.

 

SIMON: And the settlers will remain forever and ever?

 

Mr. BENVENISTI: I don’t know forever and ever, but they will remain and will flourish.

 

Mayor WEISS: The settlers, the attitude that I present here, this is the heart, this is the pulse. This is the past, present and future of the Jewish nation.

 

SIMON: So you’re saying basically that you and your fellow settlers are immovable?

 

Mayor WEISS: I say that we and the settlers here are immovable. We will stay here forever.

 

(Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni at events)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She’s also Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told us peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.

 

Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?

 

Ms. TZIPI LIVNI: It’s not going to be easy, but this is the only solution.

 

SIMON: But you know that there are settlers who say, `We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight.’

 

Ms. LIVNI: So this is the responsibility of the government, of the police to stop them, as simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order.

 

(Riot; soldiers patrolling)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) And disorder. Here’s what happened three years ago when the army evicted just nine families from a West Bank settlement called Amona. It was chaos, the first time since the creation of the state that Jews were in pitched battle against Jews. To Israelis of all stripes, it was not a pretty picture, and it made the government loathe to try again. Officials fear that more battles to empty settlements could rip Israel apart. They’re afraid that religious officers in the army, and there are an increasing number of them, would disobey any order to evict settlers.

 

Mayor WEISS: There will be a mutiny in the army.

 

SIMON: A mutiny in the army?

 

Mayor WEISS: I think a mutiny against such an illegal order will make our army only stronger.

 

(House being demolished; soldiers battling civilians; building being demolished)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) The army is evicting Arabs from their homes in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hoped to make their capital. Outraged, Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis have the guns. Israel demolished more than 100 Arab homes in the past year, ruling they’d been illegally built. Arabs say this is just another tactic to drive them out. But officials say they also knock down unauthorized Jewish buildings on the West Bank. They’re put up by youngsters, the next generation’s campaign to populate the land. Daniella Weiss told us they will not be stopped.

 

The army tore this down this morning…

 

Mayor WEISS: Yes.

 

SMITH: …and now you’re rebuilding it.

 

Mayor WEISS: Yes, and we will have the upper hand, I have no doubt.

 

SIMON: But the army will tear it down again.

 

Mayor WEISS: So we will rebuild it. The experience shows that the world belongs to those who are stubborn, and we are very stubborn.

 

(Men building dwelling; aerial view of countryside)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Stubborn, she says, because they were ordered to populate this land by no less an authority than God.

 

Mayor WEISS: This is the mission of our generation. The most important point is this, to hold strong to the soil of the holy land

 

 

By Bruce Thornton

www.FrontPageMagazine.com

 

Israel’s fight for survival is against not only Hamas, Hezbollah, and their state sponsors Syria and Iran. Equally formidable, if more insidious, are those in the West whose virulent hatred of Israel imperils its existence. This antipathy among Western academics, commentators, and reporters is itself a reflection of the larger moral and intellectual corruption that endangers not just Israel but Western civilization. The media coverage of the recent Israeli offensive against Hamas and its rockets in Gaza bears all the signs of this irrational and incoherent hatred of the only country in the Middle East in which the rule of law, human rights, and political freedom––all the boons we Westerners take for granted––are respected in ways impossible to duplicate in any Muslim Arab country.

 

Just as with the Lebanon offensive of 2006, the Western media report events in terms of a prefabricated narrative shorn of historical fact and context. In this mythic paradigm, Israel is the neo-colonial, neo-imperialist minion of late capitalism, an outpost of Western aggression and exploitation of the dark-skinned Third World “other” whose land has been stolen and whose people have been displaced. All the dysfunctions of the West, so this tale goes, such as racism and xenophobia, are expressed in Israel’s treatment of its victims. Hence the mechanisms of Zionist “apartheid” such as checkpoints, walls, restrictions on movement, “refugee” camps, “displaced” persons, and the brutal indifference and “disproportionate” response of Israel’s U.S.-financed military machine. Muslim “terrorism” is explained away as the understandable response on the part of those subjected to this oppression and lacking the resources to fight back. Thus they can be forgiven for being caught up in the “cycle of violence” whose prime mover is Israel.

 

This narrative is gratifying to those Westerners who think that a hatred of one’s own civilization is a sign of intellectual sophistication. But it’s possible only by dint of massive historical ignorance. Take, for example, the very term “Palestinian,” used as though it referred to a distinct people. Yet the majority of so-called Palestinians are indistinguishable from the Arab Muslims in Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon. The very word itself is from the Latin word for “Philistine,” and was the Orwellian name the Romans gave the region after it destroyed what was left of the Jewish nation that had existed in the region for a thousand years. Later the term was an Ottoman name for an administrative district, and as such was used to describe the Jews who lived there as well as the Arabs.

 

The current usage of “Palestinian,” then, does not reflect historical reality but rather political propaganda whose purpose is to obscure historical fact, just as the Romans had attempted to erase the Jewish nation. Once the Arab world painfully realized that it could not defeat Israel militarily, it cast the war against Israel in terms that would appeal to Western ideals––as a struggle of national self-determination, an ideal, by the way, alien to Islamic history and ideology. Now those wretched “Palestinian refugees,” who are in fact a creation of the Arab states that refused to integrate their brother Arabs into their own nations, became photogenic icons of suffering used to undermine Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of Westerners addled by noble-savage multiculturalism and trite Marxist critiques of capitalism and “imperialism.”

 

Such historical ignorance crops up everywhere in the thinking of Israel’s enemies. Israel is an “illegitimate” state, even though it was created by the same process that created Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia––the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire that followed World War I, and that was ratified by the League of Nations and then the U.N. The 600,000 Palestinian refugees are an intolerable injustice, yet we never hear a word about the 800,000 Jews expelled by Egypt, Iraq, and other Muslim nations after 1948. Nor are we told why the Palestinian refugees deserve such international concern and outrage as compared, say, to the 1.2 million Greeks whom the Turks expelled from lands that Greeks had inhabited for 2000 years, or to the 12 million Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II.

 

“Occupation” of a “homeland” is another of Israel’s crimes, yet no one talks about the Arab occupation of Spain for seven centuries, the occupation of Greece and the Balkans for five centuries, and the continuing Muslim occupation of Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean littoral, regions that were Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian for centuries before they were conquered and occupied by Muslims. And of course, no mention will be made of the historical fact that what today is called the West Bank, the presumed Palestinian “homeland,” is ancient Judea and Samaria, the heart of the Jewish homeland for 1000 years. Likewise, “occupation” of the holy Muslim city of Jerusalem is another outrage, even though Jerusalem is extensively documented as a Jewish city and holy site dating back to 1300 B.C., and only became Muslim in the 7th Century by violent conquest. And while Israel, after retaking Jerusalem in a defensive war, has allowed Muslims to occupy the Temple Mount and keep the mosque there, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, once the second-most important church in Christendom, is in the hands of Muslim Turks whose ancestors defaced its once-glorious mosaics after the brutal sack of Constantinople.

 

In other words, historically Muslims have violated, and continue to violate, every principle by which Israel is deemed an international pariah, yet rarely do we hear anything other than perfunctory denunciation of Islamic bigotry and violence. This double standard, whereby the West and Israel are held accountable to principles that are not applied to Muslims, partly accounts for the moral incoherence of Israel’s Western critics. Hence to Israel’s critics, the inadvertent deaths of non-combatants resulting from Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens are condemned more vehemently and obsessively than the deliberate murder of women and children by the Arab jihadists. These terrorists, moreover, use their own people as expendable propaganda assets precisely because they have taken the measure of the Western media, which can be depended upon to provide inflammatory coverage of Palestinian suffering without providing the moral context that identifies who is responsible for that suffering.

 

This failure of Western moral and historical intelligence represents the greatest danger to Israel’s survival, and it exposes the fatal weakness of the West––a loss of confidence in the very values and beliefs that have created the ideals, such as freedom and human rights, without which life is intolerable.

By Yishai G (reserve soldier),  www.aish.com

I am the soldier who slept in your home.

 

Hello,

 

While the world watches the ruins in Gaza, you return to your home, which remains standing. However, I am sure that it is clear to you that someone was in your home while you were away.

I am that someone.

I spent long hours imagining how you would react when you walked into your home. How you would feel when you understood that IDF soldiers had slept on your mattresses and used your blankets to keep warm.

I knew that it would make you angry and sad and that you would feel this violation of the most intimate areas of your life by those defined as your enemies, with stinging humiliation. I am convinced that you hate me with unbridled hatred, and you do not have even the tiniest desire to hear what I have to say. At the same time, it is important for me to say the following in the hope that there is even the minutest chance that you will hear me.

I spent many days in your home. You and your family’s presence was felt in every corner. I saw your family portraits on the wall, and I thought of my family. I saw your wife’s perfume bottles on the bureau, and I thought of my wife. I saw your children’s toys and their English language schoolbooks. I saw your personal computer and how you set up the modem and wireless phone next to the screen, just as I do.

I wanted you to know that despite the immense disorder you found in your house that was created during a search for explosives and tunnels (which were indeed found in other homes), we did our best to treat your possessions with respect. When I moved the computer table, I disconnected the cables and lay them down neatly on the floor, as I would do with my own computer. I even covered the computer from dust with a piece of cloth. I tried to put back the clothes that fell when we moved the closet, although not the same as you would have done, but at least in such a way that nothing would get lost.

I know that the devastation, the bullet holes in your walls and the destruction of those homes near you place my descriptions in a ridiculous light. Still, I need you to understand me, us, and hope that you will channel your anger and criticism to the right places.

I decided to write you this letter specifically because I stayed in your home.

I can surmise that you are intelligent and educated and there are those in your household that are university students. Your children learn English, and you are connected to the Internet. You are not ignorant; you know what is going on around you.

Therefore, I am sure you know that Kassam rockets were launched from your neighborhood into Israeli towns and cities.

How could you see these weekly launches and not think that one day we would say “enough!”? Did you ever consider that it is perhaps wrong to launch rockets at innocent civilians trying to lead a normal life, much like you? How long did you think we would sit back without reacting?

I can hear you saying “it’s not me, it’s Hamas.” My intuition tells me you are not their most avid supporter. If you look closely at the sad reality in which your people live, and you do not try to deceive yourself or make excuses about “occupation,” you must certainly reach the conclusion that Hamas is your real enemy.

The reality is so simple, even a seven-year-old can understand: Israel withdrew from the Gaza strip, removing military bases and its citizens from Gush Katif. Nonetheless, we continued to provide you with electricity, water, and goods (and this I know very well as during my reserve duty I guarded the border crossings more than once, and witnessed hundreds of trucks full of goods entering a blockade-free Gaza every day).

Despite all this, for reasons that cannot be understood and with a lack of any rational logic, Hamas launched rockets on Israeli towns. For three years we clenched our teeth and restrained ourselves. In the end, we could not take it anymore and entered the Gaza strip, into your neighborhood, in order to remove those who want to kill us. A reality that is painful, but very easy to explain.

As soon as you agree with me that Hamas is your enemy and because of them, your people are miserable, you will also understand that the change must come from within. I am acutely aware of the fact that what I say is easier to write than to do, but I do not see any other way. You, who are connected to the world and concerned about your children’s education, must lead, together with your friends, a civil uprising against Hamas.

I swear to you, that if the citizens of Gaza were busy paving roads, building schools, opening factories and cultural institutions instead of dwelling in self-pity, smuggling arms, and nurturing a hatred for your Israeli neighbors, your homes would not be in ruins right now. If your leaders were not corrupt and motivated by hatred, your home would not have been harmed. If someone had stood up and shouted that there is no point in launching rockets on innocent civilians, I would not have had to stand in your kitchen as a soldier.

You don’t have money, you tell me? You have more than you can imagine.

Even before Hamas took control of Gaza, during the time of Yasser Arafat, millions if not billions of dollars donated by the world community to the Palestinians were used for purchasing arms or taken directly to your leaders’ bank accounts. Gulf States, the emirates — your brothers, your flesh and blood, are some of the richest nations in the world. If there was even a small feeling of solidarity between Arab nations, if these nations had but the smallest interest in reconstructing the Palestinian people — your situation would be very different.

You must be familiar with Singapore. The land mass there is not much larger than the Gaza strip and it is considered to be the second most populated country in the world. Yet, Singapore is a successful, prospering, and well managed country. Why not the same for you?

My friend, I would like to call you by name, but I will not do so publicly. I want you to know that I am 100% at peace with what my country did, what my army did, and what I did. However, I feel your pain. I am sorry for the destruction you are finding in your neighborhood at this moment. On a personal level, I did what I could to minimize the damage to your home as much as possible.

In my opinion, we have a lot more in common than you might imagine. I am a civilian, not a soldier, and in my private life I have nothing to do with the military. However, I have an obligation to leave my home, put on a uniform, and protect my family every time we are attacked. I have no desire to be in your home wearing a uniform again and I would be more than happy to sit with you as a guest on your beautiful balcony, drinking sweet tea seasoned with the sage growing in your garden.

The only person who could make that dream a reality is you. Take responsibility for yourself, your family, your people, and start to take control of your destiny. How? I do not know. Maybe there is something to be learned from the Jewish people who rose up from the most destructive human tragedy of the 20th century, and instead of sinking into self-pity, built a flourishing and prospering country. It is possible, and it is in your hands.

I am ready to be there to provide a shoulder of support and help to you.

But only you can move the wheels of history.

Regards,
Yishai, (Reserve Soldier)

The above was a letter that was originally published in the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Ma’ariv, and translated into English by the Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA).

By Nasser Karimi, Associated Press

According to the website of Iran’s Cinema Association, a team of visiting Hollywood actors and movie industry officials met with a group of Iranian artists before holding educational seminars in directing, screenwriting, acting, producing, marketing, and film distribution. The group included President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sid Ganis; actors Annette Bening, and Alfre Woodard; producer William Horberg; AMPAS Special Events Programmer and Exhibitions Curator Ellen Harrington; and Tom Pollock, the former Universal Pictures chairman.

While American actors such as Sean Penn have traveled to Iran, it is rare for such a large group to visit. In February, Iran denied visas to a U.S. women’s badminton team that had been invited to compete in a tournament in Iran.

Javad Shamaqdari, the art and cinema adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says Iranians will warmly host the visiting Americans “but it will not stop Iranians from demanding an apology.” He says films such as 300 and The Wrestler were “insulting” to Iranians.

The film 300 portrays the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days. It angered many Iranians for the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.

Iranians also criticized The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke as a rundown professional wrestler who is preparing for a rematch with his old nemesis, “The Ayatollah.” During a fight scene, “The Ayatollah” tries to choke Rourke with an Iranian flag before Rourke pulls the flagpole away, breaks it, and throws it into the cheering crowd.

Neither movie was shown in Iran.

After reporting this story on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, Seth Meyers commented: “Well how about this, Iran—You apologize for the hostage crisis, pursuing nuclear weapons, high gas prices, financing Hamas, denying the Holocaust, and setting fire to the Danish embassy because of a couple of cartoons—and then you’ll get your apology for The Wrestler.”

By David Neff, www.ChristianityToday.com

“As for our common defense,” said Barack Obama in his January 20 inaugural address, “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” The President did not get specific, but his remarks signaled his intentions: He believes that the President is not above the law. He must pursue national security without resorting to extralegal means or violating human rights. He understands that whether the issue is the torture of detainees, due process for American citizens suspected of terrorism, or eavesdropping on our private communications without appropriate judicial warrants, the President of the United States is bound by law.

That view stands in contrast to arguments advanced during the Bush years, mainly by members of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and Vice President Dick Cheney. This contrast is not a matter of conservatives versus liberals. George Will, Paul Weyrich, John Dean, Mickey Edwards, and other conservative icons joined the chorus of those who warned against putting the presidency above the law.

To put these issues in context, though, we need to go back a few centuries and look at the Christian roots of the rule of law as outlined by Reformer John Calvin.

God’s Law Limits God’s Rulers

I never thought I’d be writing about Dick Cheney and John Calvin in the same sentence. But both men are political theorists and political agents. Both are controversial. And both addressed the question: How much power should we entrust to a ruler?

People haven’t always been able to ask that question. For most of recorded history, power was something that rulers had, not something the people entrusted to them. But at key historical moments, that began to change. Calvin lived in one of those turning-point eras. In his time, it was still unthinkable that those who do the governing derive their legitimacy from those who are governed. Nearly everyone in Calvin’s time believed that it was God who ordains rulers. They derived this idea from Scripture (e.g., Rom. 13:1-7).

But Calvin began to ask a crucial question: If God puts those who rule into office, does not God’s revealed law impose limits on those rulers? To be raised up by God to govern does not mean being handed unlimited power. It means ruling by the principles of God’s law.

In his 2008 book The Reformation of Rights, legal historian John Witte summarizes Calvin’s views:

Political rulers must govern the earthly kingdom by written political laws, not by personal fiat. Their laws must encompass the biblical principles of love of God and neighbor, but they must not embrace biblical laws per se. Instead, “equity alone must be the goal and rule and limit of all laws,” a term which Calvin used both in the classic Aristotelian sense of correcting defects in individual rules if they work injustice in a particular case, and in his own sense of adjusting each legal system to the changing circumstances and needs of the local community. Through such written, equitable laws, political rulers must serve to promote peace and order in the earthly kingdom …

Calvin adopted the “Two Kingdoms” theory of Martin Luther, his elder colleague in the Reformation. God ordains church and government as parallel institutions with distinct responsibilities for ordering society and the lives of the people. Each kingdom has its own sphere of operation, and neither should interfere with the other. This way of thinking contrasted with the earlier Roman Catholic doctrine of the “Two Swords”—that is, God has only one kingdom, but that kingdom has two swords, one wielded by the state, the other by the church. Both were to govern in all spheres of life.

Calvin used the Reformation idea of church and state as separate and distinct spheres to foster liberty. For every duty God imposes, whether spiritual or temporal, there is a corresponding freedom that is required. If we are commanded to give our families material support, for example, economic freedom and the right to private property are essential. If we are to rest on the Sabbath, we must have the liberty to stop working and not be perpetually at the beck of employers. Each duty implies a corresponding liberty, and it is the duty of rulers to protect those liberties.

Because these duties come from God, religious liberty is a fundamental aspect of political liberty. Witte continues: “Political liberty and political authority ‘are constituted together,’ said Calvin. … When political officials respect the duties and limits of their office, believers enjoy ample political liberty to give ‘public manifestation of their faith.’”

But what about the unfaithful political leader? Calvin wrote that “dictatorships and unjust authorities are not governments ordained by God.” They are no longer “God’s ministers” if they “practice blasphemous tyranny.”

What a striking phrase: “blasphemous tyranny”! And how apt. When rulers place their own goals ahead of protecting God-given laws and liberties, they are not only being tyrannical, they are also blaspheming.

Lex Rex

Later religious thinkers who followed in Calvin’s train had to face just such blasphemous tyranny. In the 1600s, England was caught between those who supported an unlimited notion of the king’s executive power and those who thought that power was limited by the balancing wills of the people and the nobility.

King James I denied that he was in any way accountable to the laws of Parliament, but this did not sit well with many. The eventual result was a bloody civil war. In the midst of that war, one Samuel Rutherford, a Scots Presbyterian theologian deeply influenced by Calvin, wrote a treatise that redefined the argument, saying Lex Rex (“the law is king”). Rutherford’s book is generally recognized as the first modern attempt to give the rule of law a theoretical foundation.

Rutherford drew from Scripture the principle that kingship was based on a covenant with the people. 2 Samuel says, “All the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel” (5:3, esv). Rutherford found that notion repeated throughout Scripture, and argued cogently that it should be the foundation of English civil order.

Indeed, Rutherford believed that when a duly appointed king turns to tyranny, the people retain their power of government and may depose him. The power of government is natural to the people as a whole, and they are unable to give it away completely.

The religious arguments that Calvin, Rutherford, and others made were secularized by Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu and Thomas Paine. But today we should remember that the idea that rulers are subject to law is based on biblical reasoning.

The issue has not been completely solved in the American setting. The bigger canvas, which stretches back to the Civil War, is carefully painted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage in Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all tested the limits of executive power, but it remained for Harry Truman to assert that despite the Constitution assigning war-making powers to Congress, he as Commander in Chief had the inherent power to take us to war in Korea. Truman then appealed to those same powers to take control of the nation’s steel industry in order to avoid a strike.

Dwight Eisenhower further expanded presidential power by fighting the intrusive investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy by claiming an “executive privilege” to withhold from Congress any executive branch documents he chose. During the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba and threatened imminent war without consulting Congress. And Lyndon Johnson claimed the inherent power of the presidency to keep us at war in Vietnam without congressional approval. This trend was finally broken following the Nixon administration’s abuses that culminated in the Watergate scandal and the President’s resignation.

But one young staffer in the Nixon administration, future Vice President Dick Cheney, became a champion of expansive executive power. Serving in Congress and in subsequent administrations, Cheney helped promote the theory of the “Unitary Executive,” the idea that, in Savage’s words, the White House should exercise complete control over everything in the executive branch, which could be conceived of as a unitary being with the President as its brain. Attorney General Ed Meese, then-Representative Dick Cheney, and others pushed that notion in order to reclaim the de facto presidential powers that were squandered by Nixon’s overreach.

But after 9/11, the push to consolidate presidential power over national security issues took on new momentum. Sometimes Cheney’s rhetoric has gone to extremes. For example, he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that because the President always has at his side a military aide carrying the nuclear “football,” and because the President therefore has the ability to launch a nuclear attack at any time without checking with Congress, he is free of any responsibility to check with Congress in exercising his national security duties.

This is clearly an example of category confusion—mistaking ability for authority, confusing capability for constitutional powers.

This nuclear argument is a huge leap along a trajectory outlined in earlier arguments Cheney made. For example, in his 1990 conversations with President George H. W. Bush, he argued that the President did not need congressional authorization to go to war in order to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Indeed, Cheney later said that despite the fact that Bush sought congressional approval, if Congress had said no, he would have urged the President to launch Desert Storm over Congress’s objections.

Despite the Constitution granting war-making power to Congress, Cheney has argued that Congress is essentially deliberative in nature, and therefore unsuited to deal with national security, something that always requires swift action. “The legislative branch is ill equipped to handle many of the foreign policy tasks it has been taking upon itself lately,” he wrote. The executive branch, by contrast, was characterized by “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” and therefore far better suited to deal with national security.

Nixon White House lawyer John Dean noted the flaws in Cheney’s argument: “Cheney seems to be oblivious to the fact that the type of government he advocates is not, in fact, the government our Constitution provides. … His argument also assumes that a more agile, energetic, and fast-acting chief executive is the better system, but history does not support that contention. Presidential leadership has consistently shown itself less wise and less prudent than the slower but more deliberative nature of the system that we have.”

Much of Cheney’s perspective was summed up in a confidential memo written by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. He argued that the President’s wartime powers give him, the cia, and the military the discretion to do whatever he thinks is necessary, including coercive interrogation techniques that most experts consider to be torture. The President has a completely free hand, Yoo argued, simply by claiming national self-defense. Congress and the courts should have no say. The executive branch is not accountable.

This expansion of presidential power at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches has worried conservatives every bit as much as it has worried liberals. After all, it is a core conservative principle to mistrust concentrations of government power, especially at the federal level.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a friendly critic and senior editor of the neoconservative magazine Commentary, defended the counterterrorism actions of the Bush administration, but uttered warnings against the “rickety legal arguments” employed “without regard to political costs.” He approvingly cited the judgments of Jack Goldsmith, former head attorney at the OLC, that “by failing to put its counterterrorism policies on a sound legal footing, and therefore on a sound political footing, the administration … not only committed serious errors in interpreting the law but sacrificed key objectives (fighting al Qaeda) to a subsidiary one (asserting executive power).”

A Christian Concern

All this is more than a matter of constitutional or political theory. It is a Christian concern.

Calvin understood the need to adjust old laws in new circumstances. No one should argue that the law is inflexible in times of emergency. People of goodwill disagree about many of the presidential examples above, as to whether the assertion of executive power was justified given the circumstances. Only time can give us the perspective that leads us to approve of Lincoln suspending habeas corpus while frowning at Franklin Delano Roosevelt herding Japanese Americans into detention camps.

Nevertheless, the principles of Calvin, Rutherford, and their spiritual heirs must ground how we govern. It’s not a matter of abstract political theory. It is about the protection of our fundamental liberties. The expansion of the executive branch’s power, like the expansion of government in general, is something Christians must be wary of. If history shows anything, it demonstrates that people flourish most when they enjoy their God-given liberties. This is especially true of the church in free societies. This is why we, among all citizens, champion these principles: mutual accountability among the branches of government; rule by law, not by the raw assertion of power; and government actions limited by the nature of the liberties government is called to protect.

We are grateful that the new administration seems to understand this. But power has a way of corrupting. It shouldn’t surprise us if this or future administrations are also tempted to expand their powers unreasonably. Regardless of who is in power, American Christians do well to guard jealously the biblically based principles of liberty and limited government. As Calvin wrote: “Those who desire that every individual should preserve his rights, and that all men may live free from injury, must defend the political order [against tyranny] to the utmost of their ability.”

David Neff is editor in chief of the Christianity Today Media Group and moderator of the Christian History blog at christianitytodayblogs.com/history.

By Maayana Miskin, www.IsraelNationalNews.com

United States Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Nevada has drafted a petition that would tie America’s aid to Gaza to the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. The petition will be sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The petition also calls to suspend the aid payments until Hamas-run Gaza stops targeting Israeli civilians with frequent rocket attacks.

Clinton pledged $900 million in U.S. aid at a donors’ conference in Egypt earlier this month. One-third of the money, $300 million, will go to Gaza, while the remaining $600 million is intended for the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

Clinton assured Israel that the money sent to Gaza would not fall into Hamas’s hands, and would be used for “urgent” humanitarian needs.

The donors’ conference raised a total of $4.48 billion, and several Arab and Muslim countries recommitted to previous promises of aid that had not been fulfilled, pushing the total money raised to well over $5 billion.

Donor nations have not yet decided how to give the money to Gaza civilians without funding Hamas. The PA has asked that it be trusted to allocate the funding.

Shalit Family in Last-Minute Campaign

While American representatives pushed for Shalit’s release in Congress, the Shalit family began a new campaign in Israel, releasing a video calling for Gilad’s release complete with the words “save me” in his handwriting.

The video will be broadcast on television, and will be sent to the public via email and SMS.

Gilad’s father, Noam, said his family also plans to begin a protest vigil outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem.

By Dan Gordon, www.AmericanThinker.com

It’s been several weeks since I’ve been home from Israel and the fighting in Gaza. A few weeks since I turned in my helmet, body amour, and M-16 and exchanged the olive drab fatigues for the jeans and a t-shirt which is my daily uniform in civilian life. The story of that conflict has been pushed to the back burners. But during the fighting itself, it generated millions of words and literally hundreds of hours of media coverage and yet, it seems, to this day no one but Hosni Mubarak the President of Egypt has gotten the story right.

There may be a lot of things that one can say about President Mubarak, not all of them complimentary, but one thing that cannot be said is that he is either a newcomer or naïve in the nuances, strategies, and politics of the Middle East. Here is what President Mubarak said in a speech earlier this month:

“Why did (Hamas) object to our attempts to prolong the cease fire? And why did they not heed our warnings that their positions constitute an open invitation for an Israeli assault? Was this planned and deliberate? For whose benefit?… the recent crisis has exposed an attempt to exploit the Israeli aggression in order to impose a new reality on the Palestinian and Arab arena — a new reality that will stack the cards in favor of a well known regional force, Iran, for the benefit of its plans and agenda.”

Well, that’s an interesting take and it didn’t come from the Israeli Foreign Ministry or any Zionist advocacy group. It came from the President of the largest Arab country in the world. What he was referring to when he stated that Hamas had objected “to our attempts to prolong the cease fire” was the period just prior to Israel’s incursion into Gaza. There had been a five-month-long tahadya or lull in Hamas’s rocket attacks against Israel and Israel’s reprisal raids against Hamas. This lull had been painstakingly negotiated by the Egyptians with a good deal of behind the scenes help from the Palestinian Authority, the Jordanians, the European Union, and the United States. In December of 2008, however, Hamas unilaterally announced that the lull was over and they would resume their attacks against Israel.

They did so to the tune of seventy to eighty rocket attacks a day aimed exclusively against a civilian population of almost a million people in Southern Israel. It should be noted that most of these attacks were timed to coincide with when people dropped their children off at schools, kindergartens, pre-schools, and when they picked them up. These rocket attacks were terror attacks, pure and simple. That Israeli children were not killed is a testament to the effectiveness of Israel’s civil defense program in Southern Israel.

I walked the streets of Sderot with a former US Marine Captain who noted that literally every single street corner had a bus stop that had been converted into a blast proof shelter while every other block had at least one “life shield” bunker. Every school, every playground, had the same type of reinforced steel and concrete shelters. He looked around incredulously, “Camp Faluja is the only place I’ve ever seen with such force protection in place.” And yet, he noted, “Sderot has no rocket launching pads or artillery equipment. Not only is there no offensive military presence but there is no mechanism to return fire either. If you told marines that they would be living in a place that received regular mortar and rocket fire, had no counter fire capability… they would tell you that you were completely insane… among other things.” He said quite simply for civilians living in Sderot, “Israel is Iraq without the body armor.”

When the five-month tahadya ended Israel did everything humanly possible to extend the ceasefire. It made it clear that it did not want to have to go into Gaza. Israel worked with President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, King Abdullah of Jordan, President Mubarak of Egypt, leaders of the European Union and the American Secretary of State, trying to extend the ceasefire indefinitely. Hamas’s response? Seventy to eighty rocket attacks a day. Israel’s Prime Minister finally went on Arabic language television and literally almost begged the people of Gaza to get their leaders to extend the ceasefire. He stated again that Israel had withdrawn from all of Gaza three years ago to give peace a chance and hopefully never to return. He warned that if Israel had to invade it was stronger and it would prevail and there would be needless loss of civilian life as is the case in any war.

Hamas’s reply was more vollies of rockets and mortars.

So like President Mubarak, any objective observer would have to ask the question why? “Was this planned and deliberate? For whose benefit?”

The answer is yes of course it was planned and deliberate. What major news outlets have completely missed is not the fact that Israel invaded. The story they have missed is that Hamas knowingly provoked Israel’s incursion because this was to be their offensive. It had been planned and prepared for months. It was their strategy, their tactics, their battlefield, prepared according to their doctrine, to be fought at the time of their choosing.

I first put on the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces over 35 years ago. I have been involved in four wars and countless training exercises preparing for war. I have watched Israel’s doctrine change and adapt to almost every new eventuality and the one thing I can say with absolute clarity and certainty is that Israel never goes to war in the winter time of its own accord. Never. When Israel can choose, its offensives take place in the spring and summer. It is as if there is a line drawn across the calendar that says from mid autumn and until well into the spring Israeli doctrine precludes offensive action.

The reason is quite simple, the cloud cover and rain of wintertime can neutralize Israel’s advantage in air and armor. Even with the most advanced avionics, aircraft have a tough time taking out targets which they cannot see because of cloud cover. Rain can turn the terrain of southern Israel into a soupy mud that can bog down Israel’s tanks and armored personnel carriers making them sitting ducks for anti tank rockets and missiles. Israel has never gone to war in the winter of its own choosing, which is precisely why Hamas chose the dead of winter for its offensive.

The villages of the Gaza strip were crisscrossed with tunnels dug underneath the houses. Not weapons smuggling tunnels, mind you, these were kidnapping tunnels. They were communication tunnels through which Hamas militants could go unseen from house to house and carry out combat in a civilian environment disappearing from one house, as it came under fire, to pop up in another. Those tunnels were not dug after Israel invaded as a response to that invasion. No one in Hamas said “Quick let’s dig these tunnels because the Israelis are coming!”

This was their battlefield and they prepared it according to a doctrine that said they would launch rockets from civilian areas in order to draw Israeli troops into those areas. They would turn whole villages into booby-trapped battlefields while the villagers were still in them. Their hope was to kill two to three hundred Israeli soldiers and kidnap and take prisoner as many as fifty.

At the same time, because they were fighting in civilian areas, their plan was to maximize civilian casualties amongst their own people. In this way, any action Israel took against Hamas fighters would become a war crime. Photos of innocent Palestinians killed in an Israeli onslaught would arouse public sympathy and that sympathy in turn could be translated into political pressure to effectuate a ceasefire advantageous to Hamas. In that way, they could at one and the same time, wear the mantle of victimhood and victor.

Here is what the New York Times reported on January 16^th, 2009, when one of its reporters was imbedded with Israeli forces in the northern Gaza strip,

“The scene was one of rusting green houses and blown up houses that had been booby trapped with mannequins, explosive devices, and tunnels. The area was a major site for Hamas launchers.”

The reporter was briefed by an Israeli paratroop brigade commander who began his comments by stating that he hated war and that he did not want to be here, but that this operation was necessary to limit Hamas’s abilities to launch rockets against Southern Israel. Here once again is the reporter from the New York Times:

“The rocket launchers, which sent deadly projectiles into Ashdod and Ashkelon, Israeli cities due north, were placed amongst the potatoes and peppers, explosive devices around them to prevent their dismantling… the soldiers found improvised explosive devices in the houses and, on Wednesday, in a mosque. The typical ruse for the houses was a mannequin with an explosive near by and a hole or tunnel covered by a rug. I can say that one third of the houses are booby trapped. ….

“He said. “You get into the houses and you see many IEDs…”

The reporter went on to state,

“The idea behind the set ups… was that Israeli soldiers would shoot the mannequin mistaking it for a man, an explosion would occur, and soldiers would be driven or pulled into the hole where they could be taken prisoner.” The ruse failed, in part, the reporter went on to state because “the soldiers had found a hand drawn map with the booby traps laid out.”

I was with that reporter in Gaza. We went in the same armored personnel carrier. Hamas’s plan was to fire from civilian houses, draw infantry into those houses which were booby trapped, and then kill and wound soldiers inside. There were kidnapping teams standing by in the tunnels to pop up from under a false floor and drag the wounded soldiers or the bodies of the dead into those tunnels which criss crossed the whole village. Once inside the tunnels, the dead and wounded Israeli soldiers could be whisked off and taken prisoner. I held the map the reporter referred to of the village and studied it with an intelligence officer. The entire village is laid out as a battlefield… with the villagers still in it, sometimes unaware that their own houses or the houses of neighbors have been rigged. This plan was duplicated throughout Gaza.

This was Hamas’s offensive and at least one part of it failed. Only ten Israeli soldiers were killed and none were taken captive. The part of their plan, however, which did not fail was making this war on the backs of their own innocent civilians. There is an old saying in journalism “if it bleeds it leads.” Networks will go with the most sensational stories, without much investigation. The picture will speak more than a thousand words and Hamas knew that and counted on it. But there are other pictures. I have linked footage taken of Hamas’s so-called “militants” machine gunning Palestinians whom they felt were of rival factions during their bloody coup and take over of Gaza in 2007. This picture tells exactly who Hamas is and what Israel faces on its southern border. Moreover, in the weeks since the fighting ended many of the charges against Israel have been refuted not just by Israel but International Aid Agencies.

One of the most sensational charges was that Israeli targeted a UN school and killed 43 Palestinian civilians who were hiding inside it. Israel maintained that it returned fire to a Hamas mortar launching site outside the school. On Tuesday, the UN office for Humanitarian Affairs stated categorically, “The shelling and all the fatalities took place outside rather than inside the school.”

Separately, Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict stated that the organization would investigate the use of children as human shields by Hamas during the recent fighting. The head of the International Red Cross has stated that there was no evidence to suggest that Israel had used any weapons, including white phosphorous, in any manner banned by International Law.

The Italian newspaper Courierre Della Sera quoted a Palestinian doctor in Schifa hospital as saying that contrary to reports of 1300 people killed he estimated that there were only seven to eight hundred killed and of them the vast majority were males between the age of 17 and 23. It should be noted that by the second or third day of fighting Hamas militants had taken off their uniforms and were fighting exclusively in civilian clothes and most of them of course were young males between the ages of 17 and 23.

In the words of President Mubarak

” I have stressed this before and I’ll say it again (Hamas) must face the cost benefit test… of the benefits it has brought for their problems along side the casualties, the pain, and the destruction it has caused… For how long will Arab blood be shed, only to listen to those who admit their mistakes later… and who wave resistance slogans over the corpses of casualties, the ruins and the destruction.”

One wonders when some in the Western media will begin asking the same question and demanding the same answers.

Joel C. Rosenberg, the New York Times best-selling author of Epicenter: Why The Current Rumblings in the Middle East Will Change Your Future, announced that on April 4th he will host the 2009 EPICENTER CONFERENCE to examine several rising global geopolitical and economic crises in light of Bible prophecy. Rosenberg will be joined at the conference by Lt.-General (ret.) Jerry Boykin, the former commander of the Army’s elite Delta Force and the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Pastor Chuck Smith, Bible teacher, author, radio host, and prophecy expert.

“With wars and rumors of wars dominating the Middle East, the eyes of the world are riveted on Israel, Iran and their neighbors, the epicenter of the dramatic events that are shaping our world and shaking our future,” said Rosenberg. “Americans are reading apocalyptic headlines out of the Middle East. They are looking for answers to questions like, Is there any chance of peace in the Middle East in the near future, or are we headed toward even more catastrophic wars? Why are Iran’s leaders saying the end of the world is near, and the way to hasten the coming of the Islamic Messiah is to annihilate the U.S. and Israel? What happens if Iran gets nuclear weapons? Why is Russia helping Iran go nuclear? How will coming events in the Middle East affect us as Americans, economically and geopolitically? Were the global crises we see unfolding today foretold thousands of years ago by the Hebrew prophets? And given the urgency of such crises, is there any hope in the world today?”

WHO: Joel C. Rosenberg, Pastor Chuck Smith, Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Jerry Boykin, and others

WHAT: The 2009 EPICENTER CONFERENCE: UNDERSTANDING TODAY’S GLOBAL CRISES IN LIGHT OF BIBLE PROPHECY.

WHEN: April 4, 2009 – 9:00am to 4:00pm

WHERE: Cox Arena, San Diego, and web cast gavel to gavel at www.epicenter09.com

The San Diego event will be the first EPICENTER CONFERENCE held in the United States. In April 2008, Rosenberg, Boykin and Smith spoke at the inaugural EPICENTER CONFERENCE which was held at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem.

EXCLUSIVE: CURIOUS DEVELOPMENT IN SYRIA
By Joel C. Rosenberg

On Monday night, something remarkable is taking place in the capital of Syria. More than 1,100 senior Syrian government officials, journalists, business leaders and religious leaders — Muslim, Catholic and evangelical Christian — will attend the gala premiere of a major motion picture entitled “DAMASCUS,” written, produced and directed by entirely Arab Christians. The film, part documentary and part narrative drama, tells the story of how Saul of Tarsus — one of the first prominent persecutors of Christ-followers in the Holy Land — himself became a follower of Jesus during a miraculous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and eventually became known as the Apostle Paul, going on to write much of the New Testament.

It is unheard of in the Middle East to have a major Christian film about the events of the New Testament debut in a Muslim-majority country run by the secular Ba’ath Party, much less have the premiere supported and attended by senior government officials. That’s what makes the “DAMASCUS” docu-drama project so extraordinary. What’s more, the film is hosted and narrated by one of the most well-known Syrian TV newscasters who explains the historic events of the life of Paul in the very places where those events occurred. Numerous events in Paul’s life are then dramatized using famous Syrian Muslim actors playing the parts of Jews and Jewish followers of Jesus.

After the premiere, the film is expected to be launched throughout Syria and the rest of the Muslim world. Sources indicate senior Catholic leaders in the Vatican recently reviewed the film and were favorable.

The remarkable film debut comes at a sensitive time for Syrian officials who are feeling quite isolated from the West. U.S. and European leaders have been sharply critical of President Bashar al-Assad’s government on a number of fronts, for supporting Hezbollah’s war against Israel, supporting Hamas’ war against Israel, forming a strategic alliance with Iran, buying billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons systems from Russia, and building a nuclear facility with the help of North Korea (a facility that was bombed and destroyed by an Israel airstrike several years ago). Syria’s government has never been controlled by Radical Islamic jihadists. Still, it has long stifled activities by Arab Christians to teach others about their faith. It is not clear what the Assad government’s motives are for both allowing and supporting the release of the “DAMASCUS” film. But it is an encouraging development indeed.

It is especially noteworthy given two Bible prophecies — one in Isaiah 17 and the other in Jeremiah 49 — that suggest the city of Damascus will be obliterated in what the Bible calls “the last days.” The Scriptures do not say exactly when or how the Syrian capital will be destroyed. But let us pray that the powerful message of Paul’s life and Jesus Christ’s love and forgiveness for all people is clearly communicated to every Syrian, particularly those in the capital.