CAFI Newsletter #70
cafi-list@christianactionforisrael.org
cafi-list@christianactionforisrael.org
Fri, 15 Feb 2002 18:07:28 -0500
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* CHRISTIAN ACTION FOR ISRAEL NEWSLETTER #70 *
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"ON YOUR WALLS, O JERUSALEM, I HAVE APPOINTED WATCHMEN"
Isaiah 62:6
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OUR NEW DOMAIN: http://christianactionforisrael.org
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Friday, February 15,2002
IN THIS ISSUE:
1. EUROPE'S BLINDNESS
2. ISRAEL'S RHETORICAL CAPITULATIONS
3. AL QAEDA'S FIRST INTIFADA APPEARANCE
4. WHEN BUSH MET SHARON
5. REVOKE ARAFAT'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
6. QUOTES TO NOTE
7. HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES
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1. EUROPE'S BLINDNESS
February 12, 2002 - Editorial from Investor's Business Daily
Mideast: When it comes to the Palestinian question,
Europeans have never quite gotten it. Rewarding terror
sends the worst possible message.
At a time when countries are coming together to fight
terrorism, the proposal from France to immediately
proclaim an independent Palestinian state is
jaw-jarringly wrongheaded. Not surprising, given the
Europeans' pro-Palestinian track record, but still
wrongheaded.
For some reason, Europe has consistently backed the
Palestinians in the face of overwhelming evidence of
their terrorism. Yasser Arafat has been toasted in the
Continent's drawing rooms while his henchmen have been
busy making bombs and sending children out with rocks
to face Israeli soldiers. And now, in a chilling
escalation, the Palestinians are acquiring and launching
missiles.
These are not the actions of a potential member of
the so-called community of nations.
After Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, he was
hailed as a man of peace. His people were to get more
autonomy and land in exchange for essentially two
pledges. The Palestinians were to renounce violence
against Israelis and recognize the right of Israel to
exist. That's the least you can expect of a neighbor.
Since Oslo, Palestinians have killed more Israelis
than they did before the pact. In the five years after
Oslo, more Israelis were killed by terrorists than in
the 15 years prior. The Palestinians have now acquired
Qassam rockets with a range of five to six miles. They
launched two last weekend.
Again, not the actions of a legitimate nation.
As for the second pledge, it took six years before the
Palestinian Authority found the time to formally
recognize Israel's right to exist. It's not worth the
paper it's printed on. Two weekend ago, Arafat was
recorded urging the Palestinians to a "jihad, jihad,
jihad." And Europe wants to recognize these people?
Consider also that Arafat was essentially offered the
West Bank and Gaza Strip as an independent nation by
then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Engineered by Bill
Clinton, this ultimate land-for-peace deal was rejected
out of hand by Arafat.
Why? Because the Israelis were not willing to grant
Palestinians the so-called right of return. In other
words, every displaced Palestinian -- some 4 million
of them -- could come back to Israel. Israel didn't
want to lose the Jewish state to the demographics.
Nor did it want the potential terrorist population
to explode. Who could blame Israel?
Now, Europe wants to reward the existing terrorist
population with a nation. What is unfathomable is that
the sophisticates of Europe don't put themselves in
Israel's position.
What if Algerian terrorists were given territory next
to Paris? France has enough problems with Algerian
radicals, and they are separated from France by the
Mediterranean. But somehow it's perfectly acceptable
to wish terrorism on Israel?
All of which begs the question -- why?
Is it anti-Semitism? That's a fair question to ask,
given the remarks of a French diplomat in December.
Daniel Bernard, French ambassador to Britain, was
quoted as calling Israel "that sh---ty little country."
And France's record in World War II is rife with aiding
the Nazis in their try to exterminate the Jews.
There's a strong streak of bigotry there.
Beyond that, France's proposal makes little sense,
especially now. While the U.S. is going after
terrorism in all its forms, it would be wrong to wink
at the Palestinian variety.
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2. ISRAEL'S RHETORICAL CAPITULATIONS
By Steven Plaut Haifa, Israel
One of the best ways to understand the current situation
in the Middle East and how Israel managed to get itself into
its present debacle is as a long attempt to fight Arab
aggression by Israel adopting its slogans andrhetoric.
Let me explain.
Year after year the Arab world would invent a new public
relations theme or a new form of disinformation or a new
way to misrepresent the Arab war against Israel. And then
in a matter of a few years, Israel would attempt to defeat
that aggression by accepting and co-opting the very same
terminologies and misrepresentations.
The granddaddy of all such decisions was the agreement
to accept the disinformation by the Arab world that the
Arab-Israeli conflict had something to do with Palestinians.
It was only well into the 1970s that the Arabs themselves
thought up the idea of basing their campaign on
"Palestinian rights". Before that, they had a far more
candid approach, and demanded openly that the Jews be
tossed into the sea. The "Palestinian-ization" of the
campaign of Arab aggression arose from their realization
that you can catch far more bees with self-determination
than with genocide. Palestinian self-determination
played the same role for Arab aggression as Sudeten
self-determination did for German aggression.
In reality, the Arab world could not have cared
less about Palestinians. It had already fought 4 wars
that had nothing to do with Palestinians. When the West
Bank and Gaza were under the rule of Arab countries,
they were NOT converted into some sort of Palestinian
state, and there were no Palestinians demanding
"self-determination", and no bashers of Israel who
thought they needed any. Indeed, there were no
PALESTINIANS demanding such self-determination; they
were far more likely to demand that they be annexed
by Syria or Jordan.
The very adoption of the "Palestinian cause" as
the figleaf for the Arab war against Israel was itself
an act of aggression. It was immediately adopted by
the anti-Jewish Left and other anti-Semites around the
world. Israel's response to this rhetorical aggression
should have been to refuse to discuss the conflict at
all with those whose sentences included the word
"Palestinian". Israeli PR people, that is - if Israel
ever had developed any PR campaign, should have
repeated ten times a day that Israel's war is with
the Arab countries and has no more to do with the
"Palestinians" than it does with the Hittites.
Israel should have said that Palestinian
"self-determination" is as much a non-starter as
"self-determination" for the Arabs of Jaffa and
Haifa and Acre.
Instead, by the late 1970s Israel had acquiesced
and had itself adopted the rhetorical misrepresentation
of the Middle East war as some sort of conflict between
Israel and the Palestinians, which was precisely as
accurate and sensible as would have been an agreement
by Allied leaders in the 1940s to speak about World War II
as the German-Czech conflict over Sudeten
self-determination and rights.
While the acquiescence in accepting the rhetorical
dictates of the Arab aggressors regarding the
"Palestinian" nature of the war was perhaps the very
stupidest example of the genre, the same pattern repeated
itself over and over regarding almost everything else.
Judea and Samaria were suddenly "occupied territories",
not only in the view of the UN but in the view of the
Israeli government. East Jerusalem was "Arab Jerusalem".
Villages of Jews on the land of Israel were suddenly
"settlements". The "occupation" was renamed the "Conquest",
in Hebrew - "Hakiboosh", a term recollecting German
occupation of Europe. The very use of the term
"Conquest" was itself an act of aggression, an attempt
at delegitimization. It was as much a "conquest" as was
the American occupation of Okinawa, with the difference
being that Okinawa was not ancient American land. And
it quickly became the standard term of the Israeli
chattering classes and the Labor Party Left.
If Israel had "conquered" the "territories", then
obviously Israel was the aggressor, just like Germany
in the 1940s, right? Moreover, the solution to any
conquest is to end it. What more is there to discuss?
Israel's demands to discuss other "things" must thus
be itself an unjust colonialist outrage.
Following that, came the recent expansion of
"Palestinian" as the name applied to Israel's own Arabs.
If Palestinians needed self-determination, the
application of the term to Israeli Arabs was clearly
little more than the denial of the legitimacy of
Israel's existence and the demand for Israeli Arabs to
exercise national enpowerment in the form of
annihilating Israel. The very use of the term was an
aggression and an outrage, yet it was adopted in Israel,
first by the Left, then by the media and even by the
mainstream political center.
Other rhetorical aggressions enjoyed the same
fate of adoption and co-optation. Israeli media and
political leaders agree that Israel's creation caused
a "catastrophe" and "suffering" for the Arabs. Israel is
guilty of "discrimination" against the Arabs. Israeli
Jews have been "insensitive", failing to understand
the "Other". Israel needs to be inclusive,
multi-cultural. The Arab war of aggression is really a
struggle for "civil rights". The Arabs have their own
"narrative", as legitimate as the Jewish one, although
apparently the Sudeten "narrative" can actually still
be challenged as false. Israel needs to "understand"
Arab rage. It needs to abandon its quest to rule over
another "people".
Now the fact that the Palestinians are hardly a
"people" and were never even misrepresented as such by
themselves or the Arab world until the 1970s, and the
fact that Israel's battle for survival is hardly
motivated by any desire to rule over another "people",
are all a PR battle Israel long ago lost through
voluntary forfeiture. Israel has never attempted to
debunk the rhetorical aggressions of the Arabs. It is
not only the Israeli media, under solid Far-Leftist
hegemony. It is the mainstream politicians as well.
In case after case, Arab disinformation became the
unchallenged consensus, in the world and even in Israel,
comprising the fundamentals for the "understanding" of
the Middle East conflict, thanks to the glib willingness
of the Israeli elite to adopt for itself the very
rhetorical aggressions of the Arab fascist world.
This extends itself into the events of the current
era. The whole trick to achieve a settlement is to get
Arafat to cooperate, to arrest the terrorists, to take
action. Israel needs to meet with Arafat to get Arafat
to fight terror. The key to the conflict is to
negotiate a new deal with the PLO. And of course
Palestinians are "refugees" and in need of resettlement.
There are no military solutions to terrorism and the
only diplomatic way to stop terror is through granting
the PLO a state.
And the whole mess is simply a "cycle of violence".
And each and every such rhetorical contortion
is motivated by nothing more than the desire to
legitimate the PLO atrocities against Jewish civilians.
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3. AL QAEDA'S FIRST INTIFADA APPEARANCE
DEBKAfile Military Analysis - 15 February, 2002
An Israeli tank was blown up for the first time
Thursday night, killing three soldiers. A huge explosion
ripped off its turret and split the 65-ton Merkava
(Chariot) 3 in two as it charged up the Karni-Netzarim
route in the Gaza Strip to reach a civilian bus under
Palestinian gunfire.
DEBKAfile's military sources advance the theory that a
hollow, multi-stage - probably magnetic -
charge was used, possibly in combination with a
powerful magnetic mine or mines. This form of
sabotage has never been seen before in the
Middle East. The charge may have fixed under the
turret along the seams of its joins to the tank body
and activated by remote control or radio signal.
This would explain how the turret was ripped off.
As the tank approached the distressed bus, the
smaller charge would have been detonated,
releasing a shower of magnetic explosive
particles, which adhered to the body of the tank
and produced a blast more damaging than an
anti-tank missile, especially in combination with a
mine exploding underneath the tank. The Israeli
Merkava was designed primarily for crew
survivability under fire. The charges must have
been expertly planted at the best points for
penetrating its special "spaced armor".
This was the precisely the method employed by
Osama bin Laden"s mujaheddin in the 1980s to
sabotage Soviet T-72 tanks in Afghanistan, a
technique taught them by their American
instructors. Over the years, the method was
passed on to al Qaeda terrorists in bin Laden"s
training camps, for turning against American tanks
when the time came. However, in the Afghan War
of 2001, the Americans did not send tanks against
al Qaeda but warplanes for which bin Laden had
no response.
The aggravated Palestinian terror offensive in the
week starting Sunday, February 10, betrays a
distinct pattern. In the view of DEBKAfile"s military
analysts, the Palestinians are drawing on the
tactical expertise of three new elements which are
conjoined by a common purpose: al Qaeda
escapees from Afghanistan transferred to
Lebanon; Iranian Revolutionary Guards who have
joined them and Hizballah sabotage experts.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly (Issue No. 48, Feb. 8, 2002)
was the first publication in the world to report that
bin Laden"s operations officer, Abu Zubeidah, and
a large band of al Qaeda fighters, had been
smuggled into Lebanon with Iranian help and
provided with a well-protected haven in the
Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Hilweh
It would be naive to assume that Abu Zubeidah
and his following were visiting Lebanon to bask on
its beaches - rather that Yasser Arafat, from his
place of confinement in Ramallah, has devised a
new cycle of terror with their help.
That cycle is a cocktail of terror hits, shooting
attacks, rocket warfare and routine assaults
directed against the Israeli military. Sunday,
Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli
servicewomen outside IDF Southern Command
HQ in Beersheba. Monday, a Palestinian rocket
crew tried and failed to deliver a Qasem-2 against
the IDF"s Samariya Command base on the West
Bank. All of Israel"s military installations must now
be deemed targets of a Palestinian offensive
boosted by new allies that may be only beginning.
All Qaeda"s first handprints showed up on
Palestinian strikes against the IDF this week.
According to DEBKAfile"s military analysts, they
caught Israeli military planners unprepared. In
time, they will find an answer, but until they do, a
rising toll of Israeli casualties cannot be ruled out.
The Palestinian leader is forging ahead to exploit
every second of the grace period granted him in
the runup to the American offensive against Iraq
and Iran. During that period, Washington is holding
Israel back from a full-scale assault on the
Palestinian machine of war and terror. However,
Arafat is activating that machine to its full extent in
the hope of prematurely provoking a full-scale
counter-assault and railroading Israel into incurring
the blame for plunging the Middle East into a
wholesale conflagration.
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4. WHEN BUSH MET SHARON
The key visit was the first one.
by John Podhoretz - 02/18/2002
ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ariel Sharon last week paid his
fourth call on the Bush White House. The primary subject
of Sharon's visit was the fate and future of Palestinian
Authority boss Yasser Arafat. Arafat has been under virtual
house arrest in the West Bank since December, a calculated
act of public humiliation that Israel undertook with the
full acquiescence of the Bush administration. Arafat hasn't
been in the White House at all since Bill Clinton's
departure, a drastic change for the foreign leader who made
more appearances at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the
previous administration than any other.
The relationship between the United States and Israel has
undergone a profound change in the past two months. Israel
is no longer counseled by the State Department to show
"restraint" in the wake of terrorist attacks on Israeli
civilians. Blame for the disastrous state of
Israeli-Palestinian relations is placed firmly on Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority. In the State of the Union
address, the president added the Palestinian terror groups
Hezbollah and Hamas to the list of terrorist organizations
now considered enemies of the United States.
The ostensible cause of the new American hard line was
the effort by the Palestinian Authority to smuggle in 50
tons of weaponry from Iran--including missiles that could
bombard Israeli towns--on board the ship Karine A.
But in the months before Israel's daring January seizure
of the ship, Arafat had already poisoned relations with
Colin Powell and his personal envoy, Anthony Zinni, by
lying about having arranged the arrests of various
Palestinian terrorists--who were subsequently killed by
Israel while driving freely along West Bank or Gaza roads.
The turn against Arafat has been so sharp, and the tone
taken by the United States government has been so wounded,
that there were surely other betrayals we don't yet
know about.
Still, the pronounced tilt toward Israel cannot simply
be the result of pique or shock at the Palestinian
Authority's effort to arm itself to the teeth. The change
can be ascribed in part to Bush's own sense of mission
following September 11. The Palestinians had been waging
a low-level terror war against Israel for almost a year
when al Qaeda struck the United States. Bush's growing
conviction that terrorism of any sort poses a threat to
civilized order around the world simply could not long
coexist with a policy of rhetorical evenhandedness
between a Western democracy and a terrorist
organization masquerading as a legitimate political
authority.
But the roots of George W. Bush's determination to
side with Israel were planted on December 1, 1998, when
the Texas governor was in Israel on his first visit.
Ariel Sharon was then foreign minister in the government
of Benjamin Netanyahu, and on that day he took Bush and
three other Republican governors on a helicopter trip.
The usual highlight of a foreign dignitary's visit to
Israel is a long and depressing tour of Yad Vashem, the
Jerusalem Holocaust memorial. Israeli politicians have
long believed in the magical power of the Yad Vashem
visit and its ability to convince ignorant or unaware
Americans of the magnitude of Jewish suffering in the
last century--and therefore the need for a Jewish state.
But the highlight of George W. Bush's trip was his
helicopter ride with Sharon. On the tour, Sharon did
not seek to make Israel appealing by stressing Jewish
victimization. Instead, by showing Bush and his fellow
governors the simple geographical facts of Israel's
existence, he made an argument--an argument about the
strategic and tactical threats to Israel's Jews at
that moment and in the future.
From the air, a powerful lesson in the implacable
geography of the Middle East takes only minutes. The
Jewish state is so small that at its narrowest point,
only nine miles separate the Mediterranean Sea from
the West Bank. It's often difficult for Americans to
grasp how tiny Israel is, perhaps because a nation
that dominates the international news the way Israel
does can't help but seem enormous. But Bush,
the Texan, got it. As he joked in a speech to the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2000,
"most driveways in Texas are longer than that."
Israel's border with Lebanon to the north is
constantly under threat from camps controlled by the
terrorist group Hezbollah. To the northwest is the
border with the ever-hostile Syria. Just beyond Jordan,
narrow and weak, are Iran and Iraq, wide and
adventurous. Iran pays for Hezbollah's war of menace.
The Scud missiles Iraq fired at Israel traversed all
those borders in 12 minutes during the Gulf War.
The proximity of Arab and Jewish population centers
makes clear how unsustainable the fantasy of a pure
separation between the two peoples is. Much of
Israel's water supply flows through the territory that,
according to the logic of the Oslo accords, would be
part of the state of Palestine.
And the argument that Jerusalem could be easily
divided between west and east starts to seem
nonsensical when you see Jewish neighborhoods like
Gilo and Maale Adumim from the air. They were built
on what was Jordanian territory before 1967 and the
Palestinians call them "settlements," but comparing
them to a redoubt of a few houses atop an empty
Judean hill is ludicrous. They are so fully integrated
into Jewish Jerusalem that it would be almost
inconceivable that they could ever be ceded to
the Palestinians.
Bush would not speak to reporters on that trip,
but his fellow travelers, future Republican National
Committee chairman Marc Racicot and future ambassador
to Canada Paul Cellucci, did. They said they were both
struck by how small Israel was--and, by extension,
how large were the Arab world and population
surrounding and abutting the Jewish state.
The relationship forged between Bush and Sharon
that day may be one of the most unexpected political
friendships of our time, especially given the markedly
unsympathetic attitude expressed by the first Bush
administration toward the muscular Zionism represented
by Sharon. But it's not at all fanciful to believe
that Bush's response to the events of September 11
was influenced by what he saw that day on Sharon's
helicopter.
America learned on September 11 that there is no
safe haven in a dangerous world, not even for a
nation bordered east and west by two vast oceans.
That had been Sharon's message about Israel's parlous
straits three years earlier. No surprise that it
would resonate in a sadder and wiser America--and an
administration sadder and wiser than its predecessors.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to
The Weekly Standard and columnist for the New York Post.
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5. REVOKE ARAFAT'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
This is very important and can be accomplished through the
internet in a couple of minutes. A Nobel Prize Judge of the
Peace Prize is trying to get enough names on a petition
(through e-mail it counts) to revoke the Nobel Peace prize
that was given to Arafat in 1993. They need at least a
million signatures.
Please go to the following web site and lend your name
http://www.revoketheprize.org
Please ncouage all your friends to do the same.
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6. QUOTES TO NOTE
We receive many replies to our "contact us" form,
mostly encouraging (with a healthy dose of hate-mail,
death-threats and viruses).
The following was very gratifying and moving, and we are
honoured to share it with you.
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 9:32 PM
Subject: CAFI Form Reply
Near the treasured cliff there's a Promised Land
Bleeding away on the slippery sand
Reaching her hand to the memory of love
For her beautiful angels now praying above
Helps us please,
They are killing us and we are wondering what
We have ever done that was so horrible to deserve this.
I see your support in Israel and I’m telling you,
that I am so proud to have you beside us.
I am so proud of reading an article that shows
Love towards Israel because most of those who love
Israel nowadays are ashamed of it and I cannot realize why…
Say a prayer for Israel, that there will not be terror
attacks against our innocent people tomorrow.
And in your prayer, send my love to Jesus.
As a Jewish girl in Israel
I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Respectfully,
Ilana
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"Islam is a religion in which God requires you to
send your son to die for him. Christianity is a
faith in which God sends his son to die for you."
Attributed to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7548-2002Feb13.html
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7. HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES
WILL THE REAL ZIONISM PLEASE STAND UP
Many years ago, following the UN resolution equating
Zionism with racism, I defined Zionism as Jewish
nationalism. If need be and, according to Yehoshua’s
rules, I can use only one word, then Zionism is, very simply,
Israel - the land of Israel, living in the land of Israel.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/feb02/real_zionism.html
HEAVEN HELP US
During periods of crisis throughout our turbulent history,
the Jewish people's most potent weapon has always been our
faith. Our enemies have always outnumbered us, as they do now,
and they have always seemed poised to threaten our very
existence, as they so gleefully declare their goal to be
today. Since we are fighting for the Holy Land, perhaps it
is time we start resorting to some sacred solutions. Let us
stop putting all of our faith in man and his ephemeral
institutions, and instead put it back where it belongs
- in the God of Israel.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/feb02/heaven.html
For more great reading, visit our new EDITORIAL ARCHIVE
http://christianactionforisrael.org/previous.html
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name on this most Holy List and stand with all those who hold firm to
the promises of God and the blessings of Abraham.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/witness/home1.html
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