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By Barry Rubin www.PJMedia.com
(posted January 26, 2012)

The radio superhero The Shadow had the power to “cloud men’s minds.” But nothing clouds men’s minds like anything that has to do with Jews or Israel. This year’s variation on that theme is the idea that Israel is about to attack Iran. Such a claim repeatedly appears in the media. Some have criticized Israel for attacking Iran and turning the Middle East into a cauldron of turmoil (not as if the region needs any help in that department) despite the fact that it hasn’t even happened.

On the surface, of course, there is apparent evidence for such a thesis. Israel has talked about attacking Iran and one can make a case for such an operation. Yet any serious consideration of this scenario — based on actual research and real analysis rather than what the uninformed assemble in their own heads or Israeli leaders sending a message to create a situation where an attack isn’t necessary — is this: It isn’t going to happen.

Indeed, the main leak from the Israeli government, by an ex-intelligence official who hates Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been that the Israeli government already decided not to attack Iran. He says that he worries this might change in the future but there’s no hint that this has happened or will happen. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has publicly denied plans for an imminent attack as have other senior government officials.

Of course, one might joke that the fact that Israeli leaders talk about attacking Iran is the biggest proof that they aren’t about to do it. But Israel, like other countries, should be subject to rational analysis. Articles written by others are being spun as saying Israel is going to attack when that’s not what they are saying. I stand by my analysis and before December 31 we will see who was right. I’m not at all worried about stating very clearly that Israel is not going to go to war with Iran.

So why are Israelis talking about a potential attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Because that’s a good way – indeed, the only way Israel has — to pressure Western countries to work harder on the issue, to increase sanctions and diplomatic efforts. If one believes that somehow pushing Tehran into slowing down or stopping its nuclear weapons drive is the only alternative to war, that greatly concentrates policymakers’ minds. Personally, I don’t participate — consciously or as an instrument — in disinformation campaigns, even if they are for a good cause.

Regarding Ronen Bergman’s article in The New York Times (see preceding article), I think the answer is simple: Israeli leaders are not announcing that they are about to attack Iran. They are sending a message that the United States and Europe should act more decisively so that Israel does not feel the need to attack Iran in the future. That is a debate that can be held but it does not deal with a different issue: Is Israel about to attack Iran? The answer is “no.”

Why should Israel attack Iran now? Because one day Iran will have nuclear weapons that might be used to attack Israel.

Does Iran have such deliverable weapons now? No.

If Israel attacks Iran now, does that mean Iran would never get nuclear weapons? No, it would merely postpone that outcome for at most a year or two more than it would take otherwise. And then it would ensure an all-out, endless bloody war thereafter.

If Israel attacks Iranian nuclear installations, would that ensure future peace between the two countries? Would it make it less likely that the Tehran regime uses such weapons to strike at Israel in the future? No. On the contrary, it would have the exact opposite effect. Again, it would ensure direct warfare between the two countries and make Iran’s use of nuclear weapons against Israel 100 percent probable.

Why is this different from Israeli attacks on Iraqi and Syrian nuclear facilities? Because in those cases a single strike by a small number of planes would be sufficient to destroy a single building. And the two regimes, precisely because of the strategic situation, would and could not respond. And if you believe Iran’s regime to be so totally irrational, then factor that point into how it would respond to a direct attack like that.

If Israel attacks Iran, would it have backing from anyone else in the world? No, in fact the United States strongly opposes such an operation. Iranian retaliation against oil shipping and terrorist attacks would lead (not overly brave and already appeasement-oriented) Western governments to blame Israel, not Iran. Launching such an attack would ensure a level of international isolation for Israel far higher than what exists today. The idea that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq makes an Israeli attack more attractive is absurd. U.S. forces and interests are in the Gulf and an Israeli attack would — according to the Obama administration — endanger U.S. interests there.

Would such an attack by Israel be likely to succeed even in doing maximum damage to Iranian facilities? No, a great deal could go wrong, especially against multiple hardened targets at the planes’ maximum range. Planes could get lost or crash or have to turn back. Planes arriving over the targets could miss, or accidentally drop their bombs on civilians, or simply not do much damage. Many targets would remain unscathed.

Additional waves of attack would be needed in a situation where Iran would be better prepared to shoot down the planes. And the second wave would face huge Western opposition. But it would be too late either way since Israel would now be in a full war with Iran.

So given all of these factors, why should Israel possibly attack Iran? It is an absurd idea.

The counter-argument is this: Iran’s regime is irrational and wants to destroy Israel even if the resulting counterattack would kill millions of Iranians and wreck the country. Yet while that analysis should not be totally ruled out, it is far from a certainty. Tehran is seeking nuclear weapons to make itself invulnerable to the costs of its non-nuclear subversion and support for terrorist and revolutionary forces. And a lot of what the Iranian leadership says is demagoguery to build support for itself at home, and to convince the masses to ignore its incompetence and mismanagement.

Moreover, while you may have met Iranians whose grasp of reality is — let me put this politely — somewhat creative and even though the Iran regime evinces an extremist anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic ideology, the actual history of Iran (or more narrowly of the Iranian regime) does not show it to be an irrational actor. In other words, Iran tries to implement highly radical, nasty, and terrorist-supporting actions in a careful and cautious manner. Islamist Iran did not invade any of its neighbors and it has not taken big foreign policy risks. In saying this, I’m not being naive or ignoring what Iran’s leaders say or want but focusing on what they actually do.

Why does Iran want nuclear weapons? So it can go on sponsoring terrorism, spreading radical ideology, killing Americans through covert actions, and building a sphere of influence without anyone doing anything about it. In other words, the real threat is Iran’s conventional foreign policy safeguarded by nuclear weapons. Are there precedents for this? Sure. More recently, Pakistan and North Korea; going back further in time, the Stalinist USSR.

Yet given the points made above, even the Iran-as-irrational analysis — and even assuming it to be correct, the probability of being right about Iran ever trying to launch a nuclear attack is far lower than 100 percent — does not justify an Israeli attack at this time.

And, finally, Israel has other options. The alternative is this: As the Iranian regime works hard to get nuclear weapons and missiles capable of carrying them, Israel uses the time to build a multi-level defensive and offensive capability. These layers include:

U.S. early-warning stations and anti-missile missile installations in the Gulf; Israeli missile-launching submarines; Israeli long-range planes whose crews have rehearsed and planned for strikes at Iranian facilities; different types of anti-missile missiles capable of knocking down the small number of missiles Iran could fire simultaneously; covert operations, possibly including computer viruses and assassinations, to slow down Iran’s development of nuclear weapons; improved intelligence; help to the Iranian opposition (though the idea of “regime change” in the near future is a fantasy); and other measures.

If and when there was a clear Iranian threat to attack Israel, then Israel could launch a preemptive assault. And if no such threat ever materializes, Israel need never attack. Any future Iran-Israel war will happen if Iran’s regime makes it unavoidable, not in theory but in actual practice.

Note that attacking a limited number of missiles and launch facilities, that must be located closer to Israel within Iranian territory, is easy. Attacking multiple nuclear facilities buried deep in the ground anywhere in Iran is hard.

Ah, but what if Iran gives small nuclear devices to terrorists? Well ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Would an Israeli attack on Iran ensure that this didn’t happen? Answer: Not at all.

2. Would an Israeli attack on Iran ensure that Iran would definitely give nuclear devices to terrorists and try to strike against Israel as quickly and as frequently as possible? Absolutely yes.

Does an Israeli strategy of not launching an attack assume that Iran’s regime is “rational” and “peace-loving” and will be deterred by Israel’s ability to strike back? Absolutely not. Indeed, quite the opposite. No such assumption is required. Israel will simply be ready and alert based on the assumption that Iran might attack some day. But such a war, however possible, is not inevitable. And since Israel cannot prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons by attacking, there is no point in doing so.

Whether you hope for or fear an Israeli attack on Iran, it isn’t going to happen.

Warning against tough sanctions is a way of avoiding tough sanctions. The effort to use U.S. leverage will be presented as triggering war or an anti-American explosion among Muslims. Thus, for example, whatever the Egyptian regime does toward Israel or its own people, we will be told that reducing U.S. aid is not an option.

Going to war with Iran is a mistake and the hysteria on this issue, including claims the regime is about to fall, that it can easily be brought down, or that an Iranian nuclear attack on others is inevitable, should be reined in. That’s precisely why sanctions and other measures should be applied to the fullest extent possible.

And there isn’t going to be any war unless Iran’s regime tries to use nuclear weapons or makes a big mistake. It could, as Egypt did in 1967 or Saddam Hussein did in the late 1990s, rattle “nuclear sabers” enough to convince Israel that an attack is imminent. Even if it did not intend to attack, Tehran might push too hard and trigger an Israeli attack. By the same token, some Iranian attack on Western forces or on oil traffic in the Gulf — more likely triggered by a local commander without regime permission — could produce a slide into war with the United States.

But here’s what’s most likely going to happen: Iran will get nuclear weapons. Iran is not going to stop its nuclear drive (though it could stop short of actually building bombs or warheads ready to go). Western policies are not so bold or adventurous as to go to war; Israel’s interests and capabilities do not make attacking sensible. An attack would not solve but increase problems.

And no matter how crazy you think Iran’s regime is, the inescapable, predicable threat is not high enough to force policymakers to risk getting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people killed, when the chance of avoiding such an outcome is very high. I am not talking here about Hezbollah firing a few rockets (Hamas might well do nothing) but a long-term war that would guarantee the use of Iranian nuclear weapons.

PS: One reader has asked and others are no doubt thinking: But don’t you have to stop the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon being handed to terrorists against Israel or somehow against the United States? Let’s be clear: An attack on Iranian facilities will not prevent this from happening and indeed will make such an event more likely than it would be otherwise. You can think up any scenario you want, but if there is a war going on, the Tehran regime (or various parts of it) has a much greater incentive to order or allow nuclear weapons to be used when it obtains them within a year or two of the initial attack.

Update: A number of sources are now saying that Iran’s retaliation to an attack should not be exaggerated. I agree that Iran can and will do little in the immediate aftermath. At most, Hezbollah will fire rockets. The problem is the long-term effect, the opening of an Iran-Israel war that will go on for many years. In addition, the idea of Israel bombing Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons should take into account that the attack will not stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. What’s the point of an attack that doesn’t achieve its stated goal?

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Barry Rubin is director of the GLORIA Center at IDC.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, on right, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By RONEN BERGMAN NewYorkTimes.com
(Published: January 25, 2012)
(for an opposing view, see the article that follows this one)

As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13, 2012, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister, and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel’s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life: whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation — the first of several over the next week — lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. “This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”

When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security) — Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as “Israel’s ability to act,” “international legitimacy,” and “necessity” — all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

At various points in our conversation, Barak underscored that if Israel or the rest of the world waits too long, the moment will arrive — sometime in the coming year, he says — beyond which it will no longer be possible to act. “It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay,” he said. “Not for us, not for Europe, and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands — the statesmen and decision-makers — and into yours — the journalists and historians.”

Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is the third leg in the triangle supporting a very aggressive stance toward Iran. When I spoke with him on the afternoon of Jan. 18, the same day that Barak stated publicly that any decision to strike pre-emptively was “very far off,” Ya’alon, while reiterating that an attack was the last option, took pains to emphasize Israel’s resolve. “Our policy is that in one way or another, Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped,” he said. “It is a matter of months before the Iranians will be able to attain military nuclear capability. Israel should not have to lead the struggle against Iran. It is up to the international community to confront the regime, but nevertheless Israel has to be ready to defend itself. And we are prepared to defend ourselves,” Ya’alon went on, “in any way and anywhere that we see fit.”

For years, Israeli and American intelligence agencies assumed that if Iran were to gain the ability to build a bomb, it would be a result of its relationship with Russia, which was building a nuclear reactor for Iran at a site called Bushehr and had assisted the Iranians in their missile-development program. Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship. Ultimately, the Russians made it clear that they would do all in their power to slow down construction on the Iranian reactor and assured Israel that even if it was completed (which it later was), it wouldn’t be possible to produce the refined uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear weapons there.

But the Russians weren’t Iran’s only connection to nuclear power. Robert Einhorn, currently special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control at the U. S. State Department, told me in 2003: “Both countries invested huge efforts, overt and covert, in order to find out what exactly Russia was supplying to Iran and in attempts to prevent that supply. We were convinced that this was the main path taken by Iran to secure the Doomsday weapon. But only very belatedly did it emerge that if Iran one day achieved its goal, it will not be by the Russian path at all. It made its great advance toward nuclear weaponry on another path altogether — a secret one — that was concealed from our sight.”

That secret path was Iran’s clandestine relationship with the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb. Cooperation between American, British, and Israeli intelligence services led to the discovery in 2002 of a uranium-enrichment facility built with Khan’s assistance at Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. When this information was verified, a great outcry erupted throughout Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, with some demanding that the site be bombed at once. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not authorize an attack. Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was building a centrifuge installation at Natanz. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle — the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.

Despite the discovery of the Natanz site and the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran’s nuclear project was still progressing. Sharon assigned responsibility for putting an end to the program to Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad. The two knew each other from the 1970s, when Sharon was the general in charge of the southern command of the Israel Defense Forces and Dagan was a young officer whom he put in charge of a top-secret unit whose purpose was the systematic assassination of Palestine Liberation Organization militiamen in the Gaza Strip. As Sharon put it at the time: “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.”

Sharon granted the Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to “stop the Iranian bomb.” As one recently retired senior Mossad officer told me: “There was no operation, there was no project that was not carried out because of a lack of funding.”

At a number of secret meetings with U.S. officials between 2004 and 2007, Dagan detailed a “five-front strategy” that involved political pressure, covert measures, counterproliferation, sanctions, and regime change. In a secret cable sent to the U.S. in August 2007, he stressed that “the United States, Israel, and like-minded countries must push on all five fronts in a simultaneous joint effort.” He went on to say: “Some are bearing fruit now. Others” — and here he emphasized efforts to encourage ethnic resistance in Iran — “will bear fruit in due time, especially if they are given more attention.”

From 2005 onward, various intelligence arms and the U.S. Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad provided the Americans with information on Iranian firms that served as fronts for the country’s nuclear acquisitions and financial institutions that assisted in the financing of terrorist organizations, as well as a banking front established by Iran and Syria to handle all of these activities. The Americans subsequently tried to persuade several large corporations and European governments — especially France, Germany, and Britain — to cease cooperating with Iranian financial institutions, and last month the Senate approved sanctions against Iran’s central bank.

In addition to these interventions, as well as to efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, since 2005 the Iranian nuclear project has been hit by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which the Iranians hold Western intelligence services — especially the Mossad — responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been “tampered with.” Between January 2006 and July 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply “stopped working.” The Iranians suspected the Mossad, as they did when they discovered that two lethal computer viruses had penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased from a middleman on the black market in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of the merchants were actually straw companies that were set up to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

Of all the covert operations, the most controversial have been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he was asphyxiated “following a gas leak,” but Iranian intelligence is convinced that he was the victim of an Israeli assassination.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. (Some contend that Mohammadi was not killed by the Mossad, but by Iranian agents because of his supposed support for the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi.) Later that year, on Nov. 29, a manhunt took place in the streets of Tehran for two motorcyclists who had just blown up the cars of two senior figures in the Iranian nuclear project, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. The motorcyclists attached limpet mines (also known as magnet bombs) to the cars and then sped away. Shahriari was killed by the blast in his Peugeot 405, but Abbassi-Davani and his wife managed to escape their car before it exploded. Following this assassination attempt, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed Abbassi-Davani vice president of Iran and head of the country’s atomic agency. Today he is heavily guarded wherever he goes, as is the scientific head of the nuclear project, Mohsin Fakhri-Zadeh, whose lectures at Tehran University were discontinued as a precautionary measure.

This past July, a motorcyclist ambushed Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a nuclear physicist and a researcher for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as he sat in his car outside his house. The biker drew a pistol and shot the scientist dead through the car window.

Four months later, in November, a huge explosion occurred at a Revolutionary Guards base 30 miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, where residents could feel the ground shake and hear their windows rattle, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base was obliterated. Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ missile-development division, was killed, as were 16 of his personnel. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, paid respect by coming to the funeral service for the general and visiting the widow at her home, where he called Moghaddam a martyr.

Just this month, on Jan. 11, two years after his colleague and friend Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility named Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan left his home and headed for a laboratory in downtown Tehran. A few months earlier, a photograph of him accompanying Ahmadinejad on a tour of nuclear installations appeared in newspapers across the globe. Two motorcyclists drove up to his car and attached a limpet mine that killed him on the spot.

Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

Officially, Israel has never admitted any involvement in these assassinations, and after U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against the killing of Ahmadi-Roshan this month, President Shimon Peres said he had no knowledge of Israeli involvement. The Iranians vowed revenge after the murder, and on Jan. 13, as I spoke with Ehud Barak at his home in Tel Aviv, the country’s intelligence community was conducting an emergency operation to thwart a joint attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israeli and Jewish targets in Bangkok. Local Thai forces, reportedly acting on information supplied by the Mossad, raided a Hezbollah hideout in Bangkok and later apprehended a member of the terror cell as he tried to flee the country. The prisoner reportedly confessed that he and his fellow cell members intended to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a synagogue.

Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond “the removal of important brains” from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection — in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There is no doubt,” a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on Jan. 11, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination came from Tehran, “that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets, and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist — one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children — watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.”

As we spoke, a man approached and, having recognized me as a journalist who reports on these issues, apologized before asking: “When is the war going to break out? When will the Iranians bomb us?” The Mossad official smiled as I tried to reassure the man that we wouldn’t be nuked tomorrow. Similar scenes occur almost every day — Israelis watch the news, have heard that bomb shelters are being prepared, know that Israel test-fired a missile into the sea two months ago — and a kind of panic has begun to overtake Israeli society, anxiety that missiles will start raining down soon.

Dagan believes that his five-fronts strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran’s progress toward developing nuclear weapons; specifically “the use of all the weapons together,” he told me and a small group of Israeli journalists early last year. “In the mind of the Iranian citizen, a link has been created between his economic difficulties and the nuclear project. Today in Iran, there is a profound internal debate about this matter, which has divided the Iranian leadership.” He beamed when he added, “It pleases me that the timeline of the project has been pushed forward several times since 2003 because of these mysterious disruptions.”

Barak and Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad’s long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Barak as defense minister in June 2007, Netanyahu as prime minister in March 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day and have become more frequent in recent months. He was not alone in fearing that the Mossad’s covert operations, combined with sanctions, would not be sufficient. The I.D.F. and military intelligence have also experienced waning enthusiasm. Three very senior military intelligence officers, one who is still serving and two who retired recently, told me that with all due respect for Dagan’s success in slowing down the Iranian nuclear project, Iran was still making progress. One recalled Israel’s operations against Iraq’s nuclear program in the late 1970s, when the Mossad eliminated some of the scientists working on the project and intimidated others. On the night of April 6, 1979, a team of Mossad operatives entered the French port town La Seyne-sur-Mer and blew up a shipment necessary for the cooling system of the Iraqi reactor’s core that was being manufactured in France. The French police found no trace of the perpetrators. An unknown organization for the defense of the environment claimed responsibility.

The attack was successful, but a year later the damage was repaired and further sabotage efforts were thwarted. The project advanced until late in 1980, when it was discovered that a shipment of fuel rods containing enriched uranium had been sent from France to Baghdad, and they were about to be fed into the reactor’s core. Israel determined that it had no other option but to launch Operation Opera, a surprise airstrike in June 1981 on the Tammuz-Osirak reactor just outside Baghdad.

Similarly, Dagan’s critics say, the Iranians have managed to overcome most setbacks and to replace the slain scientists. According to latest intelligence, Iran now has some 10,000 functioning centrifuges, and they have streamlined the enrichment process. Iran today has five tons of low-grade fissile material, enough, when converted to high-grade material, to make about five to six bombs; it also has about 175 pounds of medium-grade material, of which it would need about 500 pounds to make a bomb. It is believed that Iran’s nuclear scientists estimate that it will take them nine months, from the moment they are given the order, to assemble their first explosive device and another six months to be able to reduce it to the dimensions of a payload for their Shahab-3 missiles, which are capable of reaching Israel. They are holding the fissile material at sites across the country, most notably at the Fordo facility, near the holy city Qom, in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States.

Barak serves as the senior Israeli representative in the complex dialogue with the United States on this topic. He disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Netanyahu, draw between Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler, and espouses far more moderate views. “I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,” he told me earlier this month. “An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.” Barak went on: “The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same. The Saudi Arabians have told the Americans as much, and one can think of both Turkey and Egypt in this context, not to mention the danger that weapons-grade materials will leak out to terror groups.

“From our point of view,” Barak said, “a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”

At that point Barak leaned forward and said with the utmost solemnity: “And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.”

He warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its “immunity zone” — a term coined by Barak that refers to the point when Iran’s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience, and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) — will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project. Israel estimates that Iran’s nuclear program is about nine months away from being able to withstand an Israeli attack; America, with its superior firepower, has a time frame of 15 months. In either case, they are presented with a very narrow window of opportunity. One very senior Israeli security source told me: “The Americans tell us there is time, and we tell them that they only have about six to nine months more than we do and that therefore the sanctions have to be brought to a culmination now, in order to exhaust that track.”

Many European analysts and some intelligence agencies have in the past responded to Israel’s warnings with skepticism, if not outright suspicion. Some have argued that Israel has intentionally exaggerated its assessments to create an atmosphere of fear that would drag Europe into its extensive economic campaign against Iran, a skepticism bolstered by the C.I.A.’s incorrect assessment about Iraqi W.M.D. before to the Iraq war.

Israel’s discourse with the United States on the subject of Iran’s nuclear project is more significant, and more fraught, than it is with Europe. The U.S. has made efforts to stiffen sanctions against Iran and to mobilize countries like Russia and China to apply sanctions in exchange for substantial American concessions. But beneath the surface of this cooperation, there are signs of mutual suspicion. As one senior American official wrote to the State Department and the Pentagon in November 2009, after an Israeli intelligence projection that Iran would have a complete nuclear arsenal by 2012: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

For their part, the Israelis suspect that the Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them. The Israelis find evidence of this in the shift in language used by the administration, from “threshold prevention” — meaning American resolve to stop Iran from having a nuclear-energy program that could allow for the ability to create weapons — to “weapons prevention,” which means the conditions can exist, but there is an American commitment to stop Iran from assembling an actual bomb.

“I fail to grasp the Americans’ logic,” a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. “If someone says we’ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we’ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.”

Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the C.I.A., have moved closer to Israel’s assessments of the Iranian nuclear project. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year. The International Atomic Energy Agency published a scathing report stating that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and was possibly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Emboldened by this newfound accord, Israel’s leaders have adopted a harsher tone against Iran. Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, told me in October: “We have had some arguments with the U.S. administration over the past two years, but on the Iranian issue we have managed to close the gaps to a certain extent. The president’s statements at his last meeting with the prime minister — that ‘we are committed to prevent ’ and ‘all the options are on the table’ — are highly important. They began with the sanctions too late, but they have moved from a policy of engagement to a much more active (sanctions) policy against Iran. All of these are positive developments.” On the other hand, Ya’alon sighed as he admitted: “The main arguments are ahead of us. This is clear.”

Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments Ya’alon anticipates are those that will stem from the question of how to act — and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signaling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.

Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: “My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.” Kroenig went on, “My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.” Kroenig said Israel was correct in its timeline of Iran’s nuclear development and that the next year will be critical. “The future can evolve in three ways,” he said. “Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement; Israel and the United States could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran; or Israel or the United States could attack. Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,” he added, “but unfortunately this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The United States should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law.”

In June 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped, “Top secret, for your eyes only.” Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.

Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.

In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:

Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”

Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”

Amit: “You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”

Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”

Amit: “That is not the point.”

Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”

Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”

Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”

Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”

Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”

Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”

That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”

From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us.” The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.

Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute “Tehran” for “Cairo” and “Strait of Hormuz” for “Straits of Tiran,” and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.

During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”

In our conversation on Jan. 18, Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, was sharp in his criticism of the international community’s stance on Iran. “These are critical hours on the question of which way the international community will take the policy,” he said. “The West must stand united and resolute, and what is happening so far is not enough. The Iranian regime must be placed under pressure and isolated. Sanctions that bite must be imposed against it, something that has not happened as yet, and a credible military option should be on the table as a last resort. In order to avoid it, the sanctions must be stepped up.” It is, of course, important for Ya’alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America’s well-being. “The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,” he went on. “One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.”

Ehud Barak dislikes this kind of criticism of the United States, and in a rather testy tone in a phone conversation with me on Jan. 18 said: “Our discourse with the United States is based on listening and mutual respect, together with an understanding that it is our primary ally. The U.S. is what helps us to preserve the military advantage of Israel, more than ever before. This administration contributes to the security of Israel in an extraordinary way and does a lot to prevent a nuclear Iran. We’re not in confrontation with America. We’re not in agreement on every detail, we can have differences — and not unimportant ones — but we should not talk as if we are speaking about a hostile entity.”

Over the last four years, since Barak was appointed minister of defense, the Israeli military has prepared in unprecedented ways for a strike against Iran. It has also grappled with questions of how it will manage the repercussions of such an attack. Much of the effort is dedicated to strengthening the country’s civil defenses — bomb shelters, air-raid sirens and the like — areas in which serious defects were discovered during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Civilian disaster exercises are being held intermittently, and gas masks have been distributed to the population.

On the operational level, any attack would be extremely complex. Iran learned the lessons of Iraq, and has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory. There is no way of knowing for certain if the Iranians have managed to conceal any key facilities from Israeli intelligence. Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carriers. If it attacked Iran, because of the 1,000 or so miles between its bases and its potential targets, Israeli planes would have to refuel in the air at least once (and more than once if faced with aerial engagements). The bombardment would require pinpoint precision in order to spend the shortest amount of time over the targets, which are heavily defended by antiaircraft-missile batteries.

In the end, a successful attack would not eliminate the knowledge possessed by the project’s scientists, and it is possible that Iran, with its highly developed technological infrastructure, would be able to rebuild the damaged or wrecked sites. What is more, unlike Syria, which did not respond after the destruction of its reactor in 2007, Iran has openly declared that it would strike back ferociously if attacked. Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles armed with warheads that can reach Israel, and it could harness Hezbollah to strike at Israeli communities with its 50,000 rockets, some of which can hit Tel Aviv. (Hamas in Gaza, which is also supported by Iran, might also fire a considerable number of rockets on Israeli cities.) According to Israeli intelligence, Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate. And if Israel responded to a Hezbollah bombardment against Lebanese targets, Syria may feel compelled to begin operations against Israel, leading to a full-scale war. On top of all this, Tehran has already threatened to close off the Persian Gulf to shipping, which would generate a devastating ripple through the world economy as a consequence of the rise in the price of oil.

The proponents of an attack argue that the problems delineated above, including missiles from Iran and Lebanon and terror attacks abroad, are ones Israel will have to deal with regardless of whether it attacks Iran now — and if Iran goes nuclear, dealing with these problems will become far more difficult.

The Israeli Air Force is where most of the preparations are taking place. It maintains planes with the long-range capacity required to deliver ordnance to targets in Iran, as well as unmanned aircraft capable of carrying bombs to those targets and remaining airborne for up to 48 hours. Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.

In January 2010, the Mossad sent a hit team to Dubai to liquidate the high-ranking Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was coordinating the smuggling of rockets from Iran to Gaza. The assassination was carried out successfully, but almost the entire operation and all its team members were recorded on closed-circuit surveillance TV cameras. The operation caused a diplomatic uproar and was a major embarrassment for the Mossad. In the aftermath, Netanyahu decided not to extend Dagan’s already exceptionally long term, informing him that he would be replaced in January 2011. That decision was not well received by Dagan, and three days before he was due to leave his post, I and several other Israeli journalists were surprised to receive invitations to a meeting with him at Mossad headquarters.

We were told to congregate in the parking lot of a movie-theater complex north of Tel Aviv, where we were warned by Mossad security personnel, “Do not bring computers, recording devices, cellphones. You will be carefully searched, and we want to avoid unpleasantness. Leave everything in your cars and enter our vehicles carrying only paper and pens.” We were then loaded into cars with opaque windows and escorted by black Jeeps to a site that we knew was not marked on any map. The cars went through a series of security checks, requiring our escorts to explain who we were and show paperwork at each roadblock.

This was the first time in the history of the Mossad that a group of journalists was invited to meet the director of the organization at one of the country’s most secret sites. After the search was performed and we were seated, the outgoing chief entered the room. Dagan, who was wounded twice in combat, once seriously, during the Six-Day War, started by saying: “There are advantages to being wounded in the back. You have a doctor’s certificate that you have a backbone.” He then went into a discourse about Iran and sharply criticized the heads of government for even contemplating “the foolish idea” of attacking it.

“The use of state violence has intolerable costs,” he said. “The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt the Iranian nuclear project by means of a military attack is incorrect. There is no such military capability. It is possible to cause a delay, but even that would only be for a limited period of time.”

He warned that attacking Iran would start an unwanted war with Hezbollah and Hamas: “I am not convinced that Syria will not be drawn into the war. While the Syrians won’t charge at us in tanks, we will see a massive offensive of missiles against our home front. Civilians will be on the front lines. What is Israel’s defensive capability against such an offensive? I know of no solution that we have for this problem.”

Asked if he had said these things to Israel’s decision-makers, Dagan replied: “I have expressed my opinion to them with the same emphasis as I have here now. Sometimes I raised my voice, because I lose my temper easily and am overcome with zeal when I speak.”

In later conversations Dagan criticized Netanyahu and Barak, and in a lecture at Tel Aviv University he observed, “The fact that someone has been elected doesn’t mean that he is smart.”

In the audience at that lecture was Rafi Eitan, 85, one of the Mossad’s most seasoned and well-known operatives. Eitan agreed with Dagan that Israel lacked the capabilities to attack Iran. When I spoke with him in October, Eitan said: “As early as 2006 (when Eitan was a senior cabinet minister), I told the cabinet that Israel couldn’t afford to attack Iran. First of all, because the home front is not ready. I told anyone who wanted and still wants to attack, they should just think about two missiles a day, no more than that, falling on Tel Aviv. And what will you do then? Beyond that, our attack won’t cause them significant damage. I was told during one of the discussions that it would delay them for three years, and I replied, ‘Not even three months.’ After all, they have scattered their facilities all over the country and under the ground. ‘What harm can you do to them?’ I asked. ‘You’ll manage to hit the entrances, and they’ll have them rebuilt in three months.’ ”

Asked if it was possible to stop a determined Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Eitan replied: “No. In the end they’ll get their bomb. The way to fight it is by changing the regime there. This is where we have really failed. We should encourage the opposition groups who turn to us over and over to ask for our help, and instead, we send them away empty-handed.”

Israeli law stipulates that only the 14 members of the security cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The cabinet has not yet been asked to vote, but the ministers might, under pressure from Netanyahu and Barak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the “immunity zone”; that the broad international agreement on Iran’s intentions and the failure of sanctions to stop the project have created sufficient legitimacy for an attack; and that Israel does indeed possess the capabilities to cause significant damage to the Iranian project.

In recent weeks, Israelis have obsessively questioned whether Netanyahu and Barak are really planning a strike or if they are just putting up a front to pressure Europe and the U.S. to impose tougher sanctions. I believe that both of these things are true, but as a senior intelligence officer who often participates in meetings with Israel’s top leadership told me, the only individuals who really know their intentions are, of course, Netanyahu and Barak, and recent statements that no decision is imminent must surely be taken into account.

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

*******
Ronen Bergman, an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, is the author of The Secret War With Iran and a contributing writer for the magazine.

Lebanon’s Maronites, threatened by Sunni power, will be the bellwether of the Mideast’s Christians. Could they face the same fate as the region’s Jews?

By Lee Smith www.TabletMag.com

A statue of Saint John Maron, the first Patriarch of the Maronite community, north of Beirut, Lebanon. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)

Being Christian in the Middle East has never been easy, but the wave of uprisings that has swept the region over the past year has made the situation for the region’s Christian minority almost unbearable. Violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christians—particularly church burnings, which have become routine—has gotten the most attention. But for the best bellwether of where things are headed, look to Lebanon’s Christians.

Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

By Terry Golway The Star-Ledger (New Jersey)

Neville Harvey/The Star-Ledger

On the 25th day of December, church bells throughout Christendom will call the faithful — and no small number of the not-so-faithful — to services and liturgies like none other. The morning’s readings will recount one of the world’s great narratives, the ancient story of a child born to a Jewish couple in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, a child whom the world’s 2 billion Christians believe was God incarnate.

Clerics, delighted to see the pews filled, will take pains to remind their congregations that the festive day is rooted not in gift-giving or visits from a bearded fat man, but in divine intervention of the most mysterious kind.

It is an experience, however, that most of the world’s population does not share.

For the 5 billion members of the global community who are not Christian, Christmas Day should be day like any other. They do not believe in the divinity of the Christ child. They have narratives of their own, narratives that do not include an inn filled to capacity, a lowly manger, angels heard on high, frightened shepherds or three wandering wise men. They have nothing to celebrate on Christmas.

Or do they? Thomas Nast, the legendary illustrator, thought they did. More than nearly anybody else, including Charles Dickens, Nast reinterpreted the Christmas story for nonbelievers, for children, and for those of little and perhaps even no faith.

Nast popularized the image of Santa Claus in the pages of Harper’s Weekly, one of the 19th century’s most-influential periodicals. From the moment his first Santa illustration appeared in Harper’s in 1862, the so-called “war on Christmas” began. In a series of popular images, Nast developed a new holiday story, one seemingly divorced from the story of a birth in Bethlehem. Nast’s image of Santa was the first wave of the attack. New York City’s retail shops soon provided reinforcements in the form of Christmas gifts. The mop-up came in the form of songs celebrating talking snowmen, a reindeer with a red nose and even an unfortunate accident involving Grandma and an out-of-control sleigh. Thus was a holy day transformed into a holiday.

One of Thomas Nast's most famous drawings: "Merry Old Santa Claus" from Harper's Weekly in 1881.

So the journey from “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays” began long before Fox News and Bill O’Reilly detected an anti-Christian conspiracy among militant secularists in the media and in commerce. This year, O’Reilly and Fox have revisited the “war on Christmas” in a seasonal ritual that has become as predictable as Christmas Eve performances of Handel’s “Messiah” on secular radio stations — although hardly as elegant. Their argument is that the festivities that coincide with late December should be recognized for what they are — Christmas celebrations — rather than some generic, vaguely multicultural commemoration of, well, of something. The end of the year, perhaps.

For many believing Christians, this argument is not without merit. The Rev. James Martin, the wonderful Jesuit writer who generally wouldn’t agree with O’Reilly on a weather report never mind cultural politics, recently wrote that in polite society, the Christ child whose birth inspired the festivities has become “he who must not be named … the new Voldemort.”

The child’s name, indeed his very existence, is absent from office parties, classroom activities and civic commemorations of what is called the “holiday season.” To some, this absence represents a triumph of Christmas-hating secular Scrooges determined to expunge the culture of any sort of Christian narrative. But that interpretation clearly is myopic and, frankly, not very Christian.

First of all, those who revere the Christmas story — not Nast’s, not Rudolph’s, but the New Testament version — should be glad that retailers seem less inclined to invoke Christmas in their campaigns to get us to spend and consume. If a salesperson or cashier is told to offer generic holiday greetings instead of a merry Christmas during the shameful Black Friday shopping orgies, that’s a victory in the war for Christmas. The Christ child surely was not born in a manger so that followers might one day mark the occasion by leasing a luxury SUV. Better to blame that impulse on Santa.

Second, embedded even in the secular celebrations of the generic holiday season is a story whose power and imagery simply cannot be effaced. The Christmas message of joy and love and wonder is at the heart of every secular holiday party, every holiday tree lighting and every seasonal embrace, just as it is part of every Christmas liturgy around the globe. Even seemingly secular stories such as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol are filled with explicit or implicit religious imagery and themes.

In Dickens’s little masterpiece, the bedraggled clerk Bob Cratchit speaks of being in church on Christmas with his son, Tiny Tim. “He told me,” Cratchit says of Tim, “that he hoped people saw him in church because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.”

Even in Dickensian England, it would seem, the faithful needed poignant reminders of the reason for the season.

Still, secularists have to admit — and believers should embrace — a simple truth: Without Christmas, there is no universal holiday season beyond the bacchanal of New Year’s Eve. Jews around the world still would celebrate Chanukah, and some Africans and African-Americans would mark the harvest festival of Kwanzaa. Neither, however, has the mass appeal of Christmas, at least not in the Americas and Europe.

But in a society that grows only more diverse with each year, perhaps the holiday season requires both versions of the Christmas story — Thomas Nast’s as well as Saint Luke’s. Christians need not fear this. Rather, they should accept the compliment: They have created traditions that others seek to share, however imperfectly.

Martin argues that the war on Christmas actually has been lost, not because of anti-Christian bias but because of the triumph of commercialism over faith — the unredeemed Scrooge prevailing over the soulful Cratchit. Martin advises those who celebrate Christmas as a holy day to pray more and buy less. That, he said, would constitute an act of resistance against a culture that worships gross materialism and the hollow pleasure of having more.

So it would. But it still does not answer the question of Christmas’s competing narratives: the one written by Saint Luke, which speaks of an infant lying in a manger, and the one illustrated by Nast, which, in its own way, celebrates the same qualities of wonder and joy that make Luke’s Nativity story one of the world’s great texts.

Is there room for both? Is the Christmas story meant only for believers, or can its power be shared in other stories?

The answer may be within the Christmas story itself.

According to Luke, an angel of the Lord visited shepherds in their fields on that night in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago to announce the Christ child’s birth. The glad tidings, the angel said, “shall be to all the people,” not just believers, not just the faithful.

And with that, Luke writes, a multitude of angels appeared in the sky, offering prayers for peace on Earth “to men of good will.”

That is the Christmas message, unforgettable in its simple beauty. Look for it in Scripture, but look for it elsewhere, too. For the Christmas message of peace and joy is written in the hearts of all people of good will — Christians and non-Christians, believers and nonbelievers — who long not for seasonal scarves and stocking stuffers, but for solace and joy in the company of those they love.

As the angel of the Lord told frightened shepherds, it is a message meant to be shared.

Terry Golway is the director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.

By Jim Sollisch CSMonitor.com

Hanukkah can’t compete with Christmas. And it shouldn’t. Applying fairness to the holidays treats apples like oranges. So I say keep celebrating Christmas boldly, publicly, and without apology. It’s the holiday of the majority and has become America’s festival of hope and charity.

Kindergarten students in angel costumes from Saint Mary Sacred Heart School in North Attleboro, Mass. perform holiday songs for their Christmas pageant.

’Tis the season to be contentious. Yea, even downright litigious. Merry Christmas and Happy Lawsuit. Every year, like the eternal fruitcake, it happens again: Someone sues a city over a nativity scene. This year, Athens, Texas, is under fire. Or a governor calls the state Christmas tree a “Holiday” tree, and people get really riled up at this politically correct insult to Christmas. For the 2011 episode, see “Governor Chaffee Chafes Rhode Island.” It’s playing on the nearest web search.

But it’s not just governments. Retailers can’t seem to win either. A few years ago, Target got 700,000 individual complaints because it took a holiday-neutral approach in its marketing. No “Christmas” just “Holidays.” Target apologized and brought Christmas back. But if they bring it back too vigorously, they’ll be accused of ignoring their Kwanza-and-Hanukkah celebrating customers. And how about all those atheist/pagan/solstice-loving shoppers?

I can’t speak for the latter group, but as one of those Jewish customers, I say please continue to ignore me and my holiday traditions. The problem with applying fairness to the holidays is that you end up treating apples like oranges. Or mistletoe like menorahs. Hanukkah just isn’t like Christmas, despite the desperate efforts of marketers and Jewish parents of small kids suffering from Christmas-envy.

Lest you underestimate the pull Christmas has on little Jewish kids, let me tell you my Christmas story. I grew up in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively Jewish, and yet I became obsessed with Santa when I was six. He seemed like God himself, sitting on a throne, granting wishes, surrounded by angels in the form of elves. And there he was in the local mall.

But my mother didn’t want me to sit on his lap. She told me it wasn’t our holiday. Finally, when I was eight, I got my chance – my mother was distracted in the shoe department. I felt terribly guilty as I mounted Santa’s lap. I was being disloyal to my family and my faith. So instead of asking for the Hot Wheels set I wanted, I blurted out, “I’m Jewish.” Santa leaned close, his beard tickling my cheek, and whispered, “So am I.”

Thus ended my Santa obsession. Apparently, he was just a guy from my neighborhood, playing a role. The forbidden Christmas tree shone a little less brightly for me after that.

And I turned my attention back to Hanukkah, which unfortunately for eight-year-old-Hot Wheels-craving kids is really just a minor holiday. It falls behind more important festivals most non-Jews have never heard of: Sukkot, Purim, and Tu Bishvat. Hanukkah commemorates a battle in which Jewish forces, fighting for the right to practice their religion, overthrew a Syrian dictator in the second century BC. And then, when the Jews went about cleaning up the Temple, which had been desecrated, they lit a candelabra (called a menorah) and the meager one-day supply of oil burned for eight days. And so in another Christmas-like coincidence, the holiday includes a miracle and lights.

But really it’s a holiday that celebrates Jewish resolve against assimilation. Which is ironic, considering it’s the only Jewish holiday that’s been assimilated.

Giving gifts only became part of Hanukkah in the last hundred years, when the Goldsteins wanted to keep up with the Smiths. And because the holiday lasts eight days, some families started giving a present each day as if that would help Hanukkah outshine Christmas. It’s not going to happen.

For one thing, we don’t have a soundtrack. Have you heard the Dreidel song? It was never covered by Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra.

The truth is, Hanukkah can’t compete with Christmas. And it shouldn’t. While certainly well-intentioned, the attempt to be inclusive – to include the menorah in public displays and Hanukkah alongside Christmas in greeting cards – can seem a bit condescending. The message, at least to me, is that no matter how different our traditions seem, they’re all the same underneath. And that’s just not true.

For example, there’s no parallel in Christianity for the Jewish practice of keeping kosher. And there’s no Jewish version of the miracle of the virgin birth. Diversity is about respecting differences, not finding the thread that makes us all the same.

So I say keep on celebrating Christmas boldly, publicly, and without apology. It’s the holiday of the majority, and it’s a beautiful mix of the secular and the spiritual. Christmas is a religious holiday, but it’s also become our American festival of hope and charity. It’s the time of year people volunteer at soup kitchens and flood charities with much needed donations. It’s about the eternal victory of light over darkness. Christmas is the time many of us recognize what a wonderful life we have. We need Christmas in America.

By Jack Kinsella www.OmegaLetter.com

According to their website, Butterball is one of the largest global turkey producers in the world, currently exporting 100 million pounds of turkey annually to fifty countries.

“As an international turkey provider, we have the expertise in serving different countries and different customs, and will work with you to meet any and all product needs. We have met the requirements for the following certifications: USDA Approved, Russian Approved and employ a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HAACP) food safety system with Good Manufacturing processes. From great customer service to new product innovation to the proper certifications, Butterball has the experience you need to get our great tasting turkey in your market.”

The ad used to include its halal certification until the website was scrubbed of any reference to halal just before Thanksgiving when America discovered what halal really meant.

According to Jihadwatch’s Robert Spencer, Butterball even managed to scrub the Google cache page, a difficult and expensive proposition. Why go to all that effort if it is no big deal?

The revelation that Butterball turkeys are dedicated to Allah when slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law spawned a media war. The mainstream media immediately pounced on those who objected to eating turkeys sacrificed to idols as “Islamophobes” afraid of “jihad turkeys”.

Astonishingly, Butterball chose at first to cover it up, then denied it, saying only exported turkeys were halal. In the end, Butterball was forced to admit all its turkeys were certified halal, but then took the curious step of denying that Islamic prayers were said during the slaughter.
The denial is made all the more bizarre by the fact that if the denial is true, then Butterball is admitting to selling turkeys as halal that weren’t really halal in the first place. (???)

“Butterball claims that the manner in which the company slaughters its turkeys “allow for Halal certification.” The company, however, qualified that it does not go the extra step in reciting ritual prayers over the meat once slaughtered – that process, according to Butterball, is reserved for Islamic second-party distributors who purchase the company’s turkeys. Once in the hands of Islamic distributors, the turkeys, according to Butterball, can be marketed any way the distributor deems fit.”

This would be extraordinary admission of fraud, if true. If the prayers aren’t recited at the time of slaughter, the birds aren’t halal.
If Butterball is selling them as halal certified when they are not, that is far more offensive to observant Muslims than selling stealth halal turkeys would be to most Christians.

Muslims don’t like to be offended.

Assessment:
“And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved. When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question.” (Acts 15:1-2)

When Paul arrived in Antioch, he was an outsider. Neither James nor John believed he should be numbered among the Apostles. The Apostle Peter was the top apostle, and was accepted as such by the Church at Jerusalem.

“And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe.” (Acts 15:7)

Luke’s account of the Antioch meeting records that James, the brother of Jesus, decreed Gentiles did not have to be circumcised, but instead:
“That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.”

The Apostle Peter, having broken the Jewish law against not keeping kosher and eating with Gentiles, justified it by saying God told him in a vision, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

The question before the Apostles at Antioch was a simply one. Was anything, circumcision or anything else, necessary for justification in addition to faith in Christ Jesus?

What Luke does not reveal about the meeting in Antioch, Paul reveals in his letter to the Galatians.

“But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.” (Galatians 2:11)

The word the KJV translators elected to translate as “blamed” is the Greek word, kataginosko. It means, “to condemn.”

That Paul, the outsider, would take on Peter, the top Apostle, and in his own bailiwick and in front of James and John, is astonishing.

That Paul would publicly condemn the Apostle Peter is more astonishing still. Most astonishing of all, however, is that Peter not only stood there and took it, he backed down.

“For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. And the other Jews dissembled [Gk: hupokrisis] likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.” (Galatians 2:12–13)

Why did Peter refuse to eat with the Gentiles? Because they were not ‘of the circumcision’. If Peter was right, Paul reasoned, then circumcision was still for profit, inasmuch as it conferred an advantage on the Jew.

In other words, it would mean that a work of the law must be added to faith in Christ for justification. It seems a small thing, but this “small thing” undermines the whole truth of grace and returns us to the bondage of the law.

It was therefore a supreme moment in the history of the Church. To have accepted this addition to the gospel of Christ would have perverted it, made it “another gospel”.

So Paul didn’t just publicly condemn Peter, he condemned him as hypocrite and accused him of subverting the Gospel. Again, in front of James, John and the assembled elders!

“But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Galatians 2:14)
What was it that Paul thought was so compelling that he was willing to stand down the Apostles, Peter, James and John? It was that “a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ. ”

And as a consequence he adds, “we,” [we Jews,] “have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.”

And so, if circumcision is a work of the law and if the law is a consequence of sin, then that makes Christ a minister of sin, as well.
“For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God.” (Galatians 2:18)

Through the law, which had exacted the penalty of transgression from Him who was “made a curse for us,” Paul argues he was made “dead to the law,” for he had been “crucified with Christ”; and the object of his being dead to the law was that he might live unto God.

Additionally, although Paul was crucified with Christ, Paul says, “nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me.”

When crucified with Christ, Paul’s old self, over which the law had authority, was dead. It was now Christ that lived in him; and the Christ who lived in him is the object of his faith, not Paul’s ability to keep the law.

The truth exposed by this conflict was forgotten almost as soon as the last Apostle went home, replaced by religions and institutions and rules and sacraments, but it is no less true today than it was the day that Paul stood up to Peter and the Apostles at Antioch.
We are saved by grace through faith and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God lest any man should boast.

Your salvation is eternal and secured by Jesus Christ, not by following a ritual, obeying a set of rules, or behaving in a certain way.
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39)
And neither could eating a Butterball turkey at Christmas.

(I still won’t buy one. It’s the principle of the thing. But if I already had one in the freezer, I probably wouldn’t throw it away, either.)

By Joseph Klein www.FrontPageMag.com

There is no single issue on which the United Nations expends more time and energy than its advocacy of the Palestinian cause. It dominates the agendas of various UN bodies, supported by American taxpayer dollars, including the UN Human Rights Council, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The UN’s obsession over Palestine has led to the world body’s repudiation of its own original two-state solution, spurned by all of the Arab countries and the Palestinians themselves back in 1947.

Beginning in 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” on November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its Palestine partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.” The event takes place every year at UN headquarters in New York and at the UN Offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere.

In other words, every November 29th, the United Nations publicly mourns the passage of its own peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute, which had called for the establishment of an independent Arab state and independent Jewish state. Every year the UN commiserates over the adoption by the General Assembly of the 1947 partition resolution under which the Palestinians could have been living in their own independent state for the last sixty-four years if the Arabs had only accepted it. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has conceded that the Arabs’ rejection of the partition resolution was a big mistake, but the day of mourning and grief over the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds go on anyway at the United Nations.

This year is no exception. In addition to a series of pro-Palestinian speeches denouncing Israel, the meeting is featuring an encore showing of the film titled La Terre Parle Arabe (The Land Speaks Arabic). The film purports to equate Zionism with Nazism. It depict the alleged “expulsion of the indigenous Arab population” and the alleged “ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist movement.”

The following is an excerpt from the film’s script:

Christians and Muslims alike…unite in their hatred of Zionism…I preferred to die as a martyr rather than be governed by the Jews …The children cried …The Hagana had no mercy, no pity. Zionists! They were Zionists!…

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which hosts this hatefest, was established by the General Assembly in November 1975. Its current two year budget, including support from the Division for Palestinian Rights of the UN Secretariat, is approximately $5 million, of which American taxpayers are on the hook for more than $1 million.

What does this $5 million pay for? A Palestinian propaganda arm. The Land Speaks Arabic, shown so proudly by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, is today’s version of the infamous Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süss.

In its own words, the committee “advocates” for the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” As part of its advocacy, the committee issues annual reports, convenes international meetings and conferences in various regions of the world, and hosts the annual November 29th Palestinian solidarity meetings.

The committee’s most recent annual report lays the blame for the stalemated negotiations entirely on Israel. Whether it is the settlements, the security fence or blockading the Gaza coast to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas, everything Israel does to protect its own citizens is suspect.

The committee calls upon the Security Council and the General Assembly to favorably consider Palestine’s application for United Nations membership. And it advocates the Palestinian definition of what the Palestinian state should look like – “a Palestinian State on the basis of the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugees issue.” The committee’s idea of a “just” solution to the Palestine refugees issue would entail their return to “their homes and property from which they had been displaced.” This is the essence of the so-called right of return to pre-1967 Israel demanded by the Palestinians.

The United Nations’ obsession with promoting the Palestinian cause – to delegitimize the Jewish state and enable its destruction – knows no bounds.

By Michael Ledeen www.PajamasMedia.com

The recent monster explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base outside Tehran has attracted the usual assortment of speculation. There is still a scarcity of hard information, but I’m reasonably confident that:

–There were two explosions at the RG base at Bidganeh, one smaller, the other very large.

–At almost the same time, there was an explosion at another military base in the west, in Luristan. The explosions seem to have been coordinated.

–The area around Bigdaneh is a military zone, with various facilities including two air fields, thus questions like “was it a munitions depot or a missile base?” are best answered “yes. Both.”

These attacks on the Guards — the symbol of the regime’s intensifying repression and slaughter of the Iranian people — are part of a pattern that includes explosions at refineries and pipelines. At the same time, strikes have been spreading (and no wonder; up to 30,000 retired teachers have been waiting for their pensions for many months). In short, people have lost patience, and the smaller of the two explosions at the RG base was aimed at Major General Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, one of the most brutal of the country’s military leaders.

Contrary to the inevitable suspicions (the Americans did it! no, the Israelis did it! no, it was an accident!), the operation was planned and carried out by Iranians from the opposition-that-does-not-exist. They intended to demonstrate that no leader is safe from the people’s wrath (if that base can be penetrated, any place can, and if that man can be assassinated, anyone can), and that the opposition knows its gravediggers.

The second, larger, explosion was not planned, nor was the extremely high number of casualties (I am told that hundreds of people, including some “very important foreign dignitaries,” were blown up). That second blast was apparently from a quantity of liquid fuel designed to extend the speed and accuracy of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, the one the mullahs hope will someday carry a nuclear warhead. My sources claim that the fuel caused the big white plume seen in the photograph (above). The cloud may well have caused respiratory problems for the survivors.

There is another report that right after the explosions, the two main Green Movement leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were taken from house arrest, leaving their wives behind. This bespeaks a high level of anxiety within the regime, suggesting that they feared an all-out assault was under way, and under those circumstances they would take vengeance on the two Green leaders. Whether or not the rumor is true, its existence suggests that Khamenei et. al. take a more serious view of the opposition than some of our own expert analysts.

What this all means is clear enough. As I forecast some time ago, it was only a matter of time until the opposition abandoned its commitment to non-violence. We are now in a new phase. A French analyst, Jean-Jacques Guillet, understands the situation very well, and has called for a Western policy to intensify the pressure on the Iranian regime in order to bring it down. “If we press the regime strongly,” he said, “there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime’s implosion, not more talk.”

By Amil Imani www.FamilySecurityMatters.org

Decades ago Marshall McLuhan observed, “The medium is the message.” As the print and electronic media penetrate more and more every aspect of life, their influence increases greatly in shaping views and behavior of the public. The power of the media is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it can serve to expose injustices, wrongdoings, and flaws. On the other, it is able to propagate misinformation and outright disinformation.

Manipulation and control of the media is of critical importance to the rule of totalitarian states. Free societies, although less subject to laundered information, are still at considerable risk of being selectively informed or misinformed outright. The public can be deceived more easily by the overlords of the media when political correctness is used as subterfuge for promotion of certain ideas.

A case in point is the media’s portrayal of Islam, articulated by politicians and pundits—the talking heads on television and radio, as well as the analysts who write for newspapers and magazines in the West. Time and again we hear and read that Islam is a religion of peace, in spite of the fact that Islam has been a religion of violence from its inception to the present. This mantra, “Islam is a religion of peace” is repeated so often that it has become an indisputable statement of fact in the minds of many.

While radical Muslims kill, behead, and rape, the MSM remains silent and repeats the same mantra of Islam’s peacefulness in the name of multiculturalism. They insist that the civilized world accept Islamic culture, under the rubric of multiculturalism. Muslims and their frequently well-paid apologists use the multiculturalism umbrella only in non-Islamic lands to shield themselves from the torrent of legitimate criticisms that those who know Islam better shower on this cult of violence peddled as the religion of peace.

Don’t listen to me and don’t listen to these conniving dissimulators. Find out for yourself. See if the euphemism of multiculturalism is ever printed in the Islamic press, or ever appears in any form anywhere in Muslim countries. This multiculturalism gambit is Islam manufactured to pull the wool over the eyes of non-Muslims while Muslims carry on with their unrelenting campaign of eradicating anything or anyone non-Islamic everywhere in the world.

Those of us, through reason and tremendous act of will, who have freed ourselves from the enslaving yoke of Islam placed around our necks from birth, know about all the heinous inside dirt of this plague of humanity. We have experienced Islam first-hand and up close from the inside. We have studied the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunna. We have seen Islam in action where it holds sway. Some of us even tried desperately to cling to this security blanket that was wrapped around us from birth. Yet, the more we studied and the more we experienced Islam, the more our efforts to remain in the fold became untenable.

We broke away from Islamic slavery and found it to be our solemn duty to expose this fraud of a religion, help other Muslims to free themselves from it, and warn the good-hearted and gullible non-Muslims against falling prey to it.

Recall former President George W. Bush on several occasions repeated the mantra and attributed the horrific violence committed under the banner of Islam to a small band of extremists? The former President’s assertion was either based on ignorance of the facts about Islam or his attempt at political correctness. Perhaps the President’s reticence to speak on the true nature of Islam was due to his desire to avoid inflaming the already charged feelings of many about Islam. In any event, truth is sacrificed and the public continues to cling to the false notion that Islam is a peaceful religion. People who dare to disclose the true nature of Islam run the risk of being castigated as a bigot or a hatemonger.

Even a cursory examination of Islam’s history and Islamic texts conclusively proves the exact opposite of peacefulness. Islam was, and continues to be, a movement of unbridled violence.

The Arabs who sallied out of the Arabian deserts did not fan out to the outside world with the Quran in one hand and flowers in the other, preaching love and peace from street corner to street corner, thereby capturing the hearts and minds of the people. Islam was forced upon every people at the point of the sword and the imposition of backbreaking jazyyeh (special taxes) levied on those who were spared death and allowed to retain their religious beliefs. In spite of paying heavy Jazyyeh, the non-Muslims were treated, at best, as second-class citizens in their own homelands.

The abominable persecution of non-Muslims in Islamic countries is a standard operating procedure. In many Islamic countries non-Muslim marriages are not recognized as legal unions and the children of the couples are stigmatized as bastards. Never mind Saudi Arabia, the cradle of barbarism, and even Egypt, the more civilized Islamic country and recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, treat non-Muslims as second-class citizens and deprive them of their legitimate human rights.

The pundits, the analysts and the politicians are doing a great disservice to the public, each segment for its own expedient reasons, by parroting the mantra regarding the peaceful nature of Islam. As a matter of fact, the so-called small band of Islamic extremists is the true face of Islam. Admittedly, from time to time and place to place, Muslims have shown a degree of tolerance for non-Muslims. This tolerance dates back to the very early years of Muhammad himself. Early on, Muhammad was meek and proclaimed, “For you, your religion, and for me, my religion.” This assertion lasted but a few years until Muhammad’s movement gathered strength and Islam became the only alternative to death or heavy taxation. The imposition of Jazyyeh was a clever ploy for filling the Islamic coffers to support its armies and to finance its further conquests.

A longstanding Islamic practice is to be meek while weak and assume despotic intolerant power as it gains strength. Recent migration of Muslims to non-Islamic lands began as a seemingly harmless, even a useful, trickle of cheap needed labor. Before long, greater and greater numbers of Muslims deluged the new territories and as they gained in numbers—by high birth rate as well as new arrivals—Muslims began reverting to their intolerant ways by, for instance, demanding legal status for Shariah (Islamic laws), the type of draconian laws that for the most part resemble those of humanity’s barbaric past.

Islam is indeed misrepresented. Islam is not misrepresented by its “detractors.” It is misrepresented by Islamic mercenaries: organizations and individuals generously funded by states as well as wealthy believers who are making billions of dollars pumping and selling oil at astronomical prices. Prestigious universities in the West, always looking for handouts, are tripping over one another to establish Islamic studies programs staffed by professors who sing the praise of Islam. Islamic associations routinely intimidate newspapers if they dare to print the truth about Islam. Legions of lawyers, both Muslims as well as hired guns, are on the lookout to intimidate and silence any voice speaking the truth about Islam. The media that fall in line may receive generous advertising and other incentives from Islamic lobbyists.

Hence, it is a fact that Islam is misrepresented. It is misrepresented very effectively by non-Muslim individuals and institutions who are generously rewarded by the modern day Islamic conquerors. This time around the Muslims are using the immense petrodollar they extract from the addicted non-Muslims.

The sword is temporarily replaced by just as deadly a weapon—the petrodollar. Before long, the Muslims aim to add a more deadly modern version of the sword—the Islamic bomb. With the bomb on one hand and the other hand on the oil spigot, the non-Muslim world will be brought to its knees by the religion of peace and brotherhood.

By Michael Ledeen, www.PajamasMedia.com

In the real war, our major enemies are the evil regimes in Iran and Syria, and both are hollow and wobbling, needing only one good push to go over.

Syrian soldiers are defecting in significant numbers, while brave, peaceful demonstrators continue to fill the streets despite the likelihood of arrest, torture, and death. The regime is unleashing mass slaughter, as army troops fire blindly into the crowds from a safe distance, a sure sign that Assad has lost control, despite massive Iranian assistance.

In Iran, the war of all against all at the highest levels of the regime continues unabated. The latest tumult revolves around the theft of billions of dollars from the major banks, and it is accompanied by strikes at bazaars and factories, explosions in pipelines and refineries, and open warfare along the borders with the Kurds, where, despite the regime’s usual disinformation campaign, Iranian casualties have been significant. Somehow the Kurds are being armed, and they are notoriously good fighters.

The defeat of Assad and Khamenei would be a world-changing event, pulling the plug on the ominous strategic alliance that runs from Tehran and Damascus to countries quite close to us, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. It would weaken Putin’s ability to sponsor dangerous mischief in the Middle East and our own hemisphere. And it would deprive the terror network of safe havens, funding, weapons, logistics, and intelligence, along with the sort of documentation they need (think false passports) to travel safely.

In Iran, the opposition is overwhelmingly pro-Western, and eminently worthy of our support (once again, for those tuning in late, I’m talking about political, technological, and financial support, not military anything), while in Syria we should steer away from those many characters linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist crowd. But there are plenty of good democrats fighting against Assad. Having dithered so long, we are now facing some nasty scenarios, and it may well be that the Free Syrian Army — the defectors from the regular armed forces — will need some sort of military assistance.

These decisions will have to be made by people who know more about the actual battlefield than you or I, but they should be made within a narrow context: what is the best way to bring down Assad and Khamenei? Despite decades of bad policy, the fates have delivered our enemies to us. They are waiting for a swift kick, or a decisive thrust from our side. One will get you ten the tyrants have already made plans for life in exile.

How did this happen, without anyone seeming to notice? I think it is because we are not permitted to tell the truth about the war: we defeated al-Qaeda, Iran and Syria in Iraq, and the consequences of that defeat have been very serious for our enemies. They preached that Allah had blessed their jihad, and when they were beaten, it raised terrible questions to which they have no truthful answers. But the truth is quite obvious to the would-be enemy fighters, who know that the promise of victory was not fulfilled on the Middle East’s major battlefield, and whatever your view of the Afghan fighting, nobody I respect really believes that we are being beaten by the Taliban.

We’re right on the edge of an historic watershed, in which our totalitarian enemies can be driven into history’s bin of losers. It is time for us to declare victory and then impose our will on our enemies by giving their oppressed people the opportunity to free themselves from the bloody tyrants.

It’s up to our leaders to demonstrate they have the will to win. Win a real war, not just a political poll. And by the way, if our current leaders were to do that, they’d do a lot better in the polls.

Faster, please.