Our European Enemy

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Our state is tiny, in size and population. The Nations didn’t want it to exist at all, and when they couldn’t stop it they did their best to keep it small. There aren’t so many Jews in the world, anyway; millennia of oppression and murder have kept our numbers down, and today there are millions who are “Jewish by extraction” but are assimilated enough to other cultures to be lost forever to the Jewish people.

In all the world there are fewer than 15 million Jews, in Israel fewer than 7 million. But there are forces arrayed against us that are unique in their scope and viciousness. Throughout the world, even in countries where there are few Jews or none at all, people have opinions about us. According to a worldwide survey done by the ADL, some 26% of the world’s 7.5 billion people “harbor antisemitic attitudes.” That is incredible, when you think about it.

There are 35 million Kurds in the world, another people seeking (but so far not getting) self-determination. Certainly they have issues with their Turkish and other neighbors, but I venture to guess that it is highly unlikely that anywhere near as many people have even heard of the Kurds, much less “harbor anti-Kurdish attitudes.”

What’s true for Jews goes triple for their state. I won’t repeat the depressing statistics about the number of UN resolutions condemning Israel that pass every year, and the fact that it is consistently attacked there for crimes that it did not commit while countries that do engage in murder, aggression, and oppression are never mentioned. I won’t go into detail about the extreme and irrational anti-Israel expression (misoziony*) found in almost one hundred percent of the world’s academic and artistic realms.

Really, Israel and Jews are sui generis in the “objects of hatred” department (and if you think it is our fault, you are part of the problem).

This hatred is not just theoretical. From time to time, our immediate neighbors, cousins if you will, start wars whose intent is to kill or disperse the Jews who are occupying the Land of Israel. As a result, Israel has been forced to spend a large portion of her GDP on defense, which has led to her possession of very advanced military technology, which – along with her slightly better degree of organization – led to the defeat of our enemies in conventional war. That in turn led them to adopt strategies of asymmetric warfare and terrorism, which we have managed to counter, although less successfully.

These aren’t our only enemies. In the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most highly developed scientific, literary, and musical cultures in the Western world descended into genocidal madness and ignited a war which resulted in 60 million dead and much of Europe laid waste, primarily – there were other reasons, but I’ll stick with “primarily” – to annihilate us. Largish groups in almost every country of Eastern and Western Europe worked together with the Nazis to help collect, ship, and exterminate those of us who fell into their hands.

After the war there was a general revulsion in what was left of the countries that had participated in the biggest pogrom in history, as well as an understanding on the part of the Jewish remnant that our state had to be established regardless of the cost, which prevailed against the resistance – imagine, after all that! – the resistance from Britain and the Arabs.

But the antisemitism of Europe didn’t go away, although it was pushed under cover by the embarrassment of its involvement in the pogrom of pogroms. There was no embarrassment about expressing it in the form of misoziony, the wild hatred of the state that we managed to establish despite Britain’s best efforts to prevent it. And while there is still enough revulsion left to prevent them from repeating their attempt to liquidate our people, it hasn’t stopped them from paying to create the conditions for others to do it for them.

So we have European powers, particularly Germany (of all nations) and the hyper-civilized Scandinavian countries, the ones who abhor physical violence and have made the expression of racist sentiments illegal, spending millions of Euros of their citizens’ taxes on enterprises designed to weaken the Jewish state and set the stage for its destruction by Arabs or Iranians who aren’t squeamish about direct action with guns and bombs to accomplish the goal desired – but never said out loud in public – in Brussels, Berlin, and Stockholm.

European money keeps numerous international and Israeli organizations afloat, usually ostensibly in defense of human rights, but practically focusing on the rights and national aspirations of one particular group, the Palestinian Arabs. If you ask an honest Palestinian, he will tell you that he aspires, above all else, to violently kick the Jews out of all of the Land of Israel, in which he believes they have no right to live (except as a dhimmi minority), and certainly no right to have a sovereign state.

The Europeans, realizing that this aspiration smells uncomfortably like the 1940s, insist that what they want is only to divide Israel along the 1949 armistice line and set up a Palestinian Arab state in the eastern part. Then this state will live happily alongside Israel, with its 9-mile wide waist, and the “Middle Eastern Conflict” will be over. This is called the “two-state solution,” but of course won’t solve anything except the difficulties the Arabs have today in hitting Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport from their territory with the cheapest and simplest of mortars.

Israelis learned by experience that Arab control of areas near Jewish populations makes them a target of terrorism and rocket attacks, and refuse to vote for the stupid or psychologically disturbed politicians who advocate this. Thus, since the Second Intifada (2000-3) and the Hamas takeover of Gaza (2007), Israeli voters have rejected the parties of the Left, whose support has fallen to the point that they flirt with the cutoff percentage in elections.

Europe wants to change that. For example – and this is just one of countless similar examples – the European Union has granted more than half a million dollars (500,000 Euros) to an Israeli NGO whose objective is to change the attitude of Russian-speaking Israelis, who have always leaned politically right – for obvious reasons – and who have opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. The EU says that the grant is intended to

…promote conditions for a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and potential shifts in public opinion among the Russian-speaking community by building confidence and trust in the two-state solution among a population that has traditionally rejected and been omitted from the process, as well as to deconstruct a negative view of the Palestinian narrative.

It should be obvious that the political attitudes of Russian-speaking Israelis are nobody’s business but Israel’s. But this item provides a window into the overall program of the EU and individual European countries, which work on numerous levels to bring about the partition of the Land of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state.

This and other manipulative programs, including financial support for international and Israeli NGOs that propagandize, support BDS, and engage in lawfare against Israel, complement the EU’s investment in building infrastructure for Palestinians in Area C, the part of Judea and Samaria that according to the Oslo accords is under Israeli civil control. These building projects, done without permits or permission, are intended to create facts on the ground that will make it more difficult for Israel to retain control of these areas in any future deal. At the same time, international pressure on Israel to not build in the territories, even inside existing settlements that will certainly end up as part of Israel, has been effective. Despite news reports that “1000 new homes have been approved” and so forth, very few buildings have actually been constructed. And illegal Palestinian settlements have not been removed.

Make no mistake – the Palestinian leadership has no interest in a state in the territories except as a stepping stone to the replacement of Israel by an Arab state, and the death or dispersal of about half of the Jewish people. They say it themselves over and over.

Are officials in the EU and individual countries that support this project so stupid or blind and deaf as to fail to understand that? Do they not know that the funds that they provide to the Palestinian Authority are used to pay terrorists? Do they not see that UNRWA, of which they are now the prime funder, educates Palestinian children to hate?

I don’t believe it.

_______________________
* Misoziony (pronounced mis-OZ-yoni) is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.

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How Zionism Keeps us in the Game

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Anshel Pfeffer, a very smart guy and one of the few writers that regularly appears in Ha’aretz who is worth reading, does not believe in Zionism. He doesn’t oppose it, he just thinks talking about it is a kind of category mistake:

You cannot be either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, just as you cannot be a veteran of Iwo Jima unless you were born at least 90 years ago and fought in that battle. Zionism isn’t an ideology. It’s a program, or an ideological plan, to establish a state for Jews in the biblical homeland. And that program was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence at the old Tel Aviv Museum. That’s it. Done.

…believing that on the whole, founding the State of Israel was the right thing to do, doesn’t make you a Zionist any more than thinking that Oliver Cromwell was right to overthrow King Charles, makes you a Roundhead. It simply doesn’t matter what you think about long-ago events you didn’t take part in. Israel is a reality and it’s not going anywhere.

As a consequence, he thinks that the World Zionist Congress is a waste of time and money, as are almost all other Zionist organizations, including those like the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund that are closely entwined with the government of Israel.

He’s right about those organizations, but he’s wrong about Zionism. There absolutely is such a thing as Zionist ideology, a set of basic principles that Zionists believe. And here they are:

  1. There is an am Yehudi, a Jewish people (I discuss the concept of a people here). You might think this is obvious, but Mahmoud Abbas denies it, and so do the “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion” crowd, which includes much of the American Reform Movement.
  2. The survival of the Jewish people requires the Jewish state, a state that is more than just a state with a Jewish majority. The precise meaning of “more” differs according to the faction of the Zionist movement to which one belongs, but the Nation-State Law that was passed by the Knesset in 2018 is an example of a secular attempt to explicate that.
  3. Only in the Jewish state can a person fully realize his Jewish identity. You can still be a Zionist if you don’t believe that all Jews ought to live in the Jewish state, but Zionism includes the idea that diaspora life is sub-optimal even when it is not actively dangerous.

Pfeffer points out that there were religious and secular, socialist and revisionist Zionisms, and this was true before 1948, and it’s still true today. But all of them affirm the principles above. The existence of factions doesn’t negate the truth behind an ideology. After all, these are Jews we are talking about.

One needn’t be a Jew to be a Zionist. Agree with the principles above and you are a Zionist, regardless of your own religion or peoplehood.

Pfeffer’s criticisms of “Zionist” organizations are on target: diaspora Jewry no longer needs to subsidize the thriving state of Israel, nor does it need to support bloated bureaucracies that carry out functions that could more transparently and simply be handled by the government, like vetting new immigrants under the Law of Return or planting trees in Israel’s forests. These organizations are vestiges of the pre-state struggle to maintain and grow the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. We should get rid of them.

But he conflates the bureaucratic excrescences of a long-accomplished program to create a state with the ideology that gave rise to the program – and which is the reason for the continued existence of that state. That ideology and that state are under continued attack today. “Israel isn’t going anywhere,” he says, but there are many who would like to see it changed beyond recognition, in particular by denying the part of proposition 2) above which says that the Jewish state must be more than just a state with a Jewish majority.

Attacks on Zionism center on the inescapable fact that no matter how careful Israel is in ensuring the civil rights of all its citizens – which Israel does relatively well, given the circumstances – that insistence on “more than just a Jewish majority” represents a degree of ethnic privilege. There is a Law of Return for Jews and not for Arabs, and it is an essential part of a Jewish state, as are the symbols of the state, its official language, its holidays, and so forth.

It’s not only Israel’s enemies who oppose Zionism. There are patriotic Israelis who love their country, pay their taxes, and have fought in Israel’s wars, who believe that Israel ought to be nothing more than a state of all of its citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike. That is an anti-Zionist position.

Zionism is a form of ethnic nationalism, and in today’s intellectual climate, forged by the European wars of the 20th century, nationalism is considered incompatible with liberal democracy. However, Israel is a special case, because the Jewish people are a special case. The Jews are unique in history for maintaining their identity both in their homeland and in exile from it for several millennia. The Jewish people are the paradigm case that defines our conception of a “people,” and antisemitism is the paradigm case for understanding ethnic hatred.

Zionism didn’t appear from nowhere. It was the considered answer from Herzl and others to such phenomena as the failure of European liberalism to extend emancipation to Jews and to end the scourge of Jew-hatred. The truth of Zionism was emphatically demonstrated by the Holocaust, in which Jews were murdered by the millions by members of what was, in some ways, the most highly developed culture on the planet.

The Jewish people’s historical narrative, expressed in the Torah – which can be appreciated by any educated Jew, even those who do not pray three times a day or even ever set foot in a synagogue – is a story about the relationship between Hashem, the Jewish people, and the land of Israel. This is who we are, the people who were given this land to be their home as long as they behaved themselves. You don’t have to be observant in the traditional sense to be moved by the basic idea. It is the glue that holds us together as a people.

The conversion of the Jewish state to a pure liberal democracy would be a tragedy for the Jewish people even if it didn’t lead to Israel’s transition away from a Jewish majority state. It would rip us away from our narrative and – I believe – begin the final disappearance of the Jewish people from the world stage.

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The Deal

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

First, divest yourself from the idea that this plan is just a trick to divert attention from Trump’s impeachment or Bibi’s indictment. The document describing it is 181 pages long. It is not a diversion. I am not interested in the question of whether its release now will help Trump (I suspect it won’t matter) or Bibi (it’s unclear). Also, if you are one of my readers who hates Trump – if I still have any, after proposing that he get the Nobel Peace Prize – please put that aside. This paragraph is the last one in this post that will mention him. I want to focus on the proposal itself.

I will not pretend to have read all 181 pages yet. But the broad outline of the proposal, including maps, is contained in the first 40-odd pages. It is a thoughtful attempt to arrive at a solution, and it takes into account the failure of previous efforts. There is a huge amount of material here, and I could write essays about the presuppositions and the implications of every page, but I will try to limit myself to describing the proposal in general terms and discussing its significance in the long and depressing saga of the “peace process.” In recent years, proposals have centered around the ideas first expressed in the Clinton parameters of 2000-1, which envision most of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as a Palestinian entity, with swaps to allow the large settlement blocs to continue to exist. The new proposal diverges sharply from these plans.

Summary of the plan

The plan (the official name is “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”) is a two-state solution which preserves the original intention of UN Security Council Resolution 242, in which Israel withdraws from some of the territory taken in 1967, while keeping secure boundaries. The Palestinian “state” here is more like Rabin’s vision of something “less than a state,” because Palestine will be demilitarized, and its borders and airspace will be controlled by Israel for an unlimited time.

The plan is intended as a statement of concepts, although it is a pretty detailed one. It calls for an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation whose product will be a final “peace agreement” with all the details worked out. During the period of negotiations, Israel will freeze construction or expansion of settlements (for a maximum of four years) in those areas that are defined as Palestinian in the plan.

The agreement would create a “state” of Palestine that encompasses most of today’s Areas A and B and some of Area C. Israel will receive most of Area C, including the Jordan Valley. 97% of Palestinians will find themselves in Palestine and 97% of Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria will be in Israel. The remainder will be in Palestinian enclaves in Israel, or Israeli enclaves in Palestine. Enclaves will be under civil control of their respective governments, but Israel will be responsible for security in both cases. Israel will provide land swaps (attached to Gaza along the border with Egypt) which will give Palestine roughly the same area as the pre-1967 “West Bank” and Gaza. There will be a high-speed rail link (on the map it is shown as a tunnel) between the eastern part of Palestine and Gaza, and special roads across the Jordan Valley to the Allenby Bridge with Jordan. Infrastructure will be built to ensure that Israeli and Palestinian enclaves are not isolated. It’s possible that some Israeli Arab communities in the “Arab Triangle” near Umm al-Fahm might be included in Palestine.

In no case will any Jews or Arabs be required to move from their homes, a principle that diverges significantly from previous plans which included the removal of Jewish settlements.

I’ve included the two “conceptual maps” from the proposal at the end of this post. They show the borders and other features envisioned by the proposal.

Jerusalem will continue to be the capital of Israel, and Israel will continue to provide security for the holy sites of all the religions. The city will not be re-divided along the 1949 armistice line, but the areas east and north of the existing security barrier (“including Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis”) will become the capital of the State of Palestine, and may be renamed “Al Quds” or whatever the Palestinians decide. Arabs living in Jerusalem inside the security barrier will have the option to become citizens of Israel or Palestine, or retain the status of Permanent Resident of Israel (most Jerusalem Arabs chose this status after 1967 rather than becoming citizens).

The “Vision” provides for an economic plan to provide for a viable Palestinian state rather than one that relies on international donors. I won’t discuss this here.

Overall security for both states will be Israel’s responsibility from Day One, “with the aspiration that the Palestinians will be responsible for as much of their internal security as possible, subject to the provisions of this Vision.”

Israel will retain control of airspace and electromagnetic spectrum from the river to the sea. Special arrangements will be made to protect Ben-Gurion airport from nearby Palestinian areas.

The State of Palestine will be expected to take serious measures to prevent terrorism, which should be evaluated in terms “no less stringent” than those applied to Jordan or Egypt.

The Israeli Navy will be able to block the import of “prohibited weapons and weapon-making materials” to Palestine, including of course Gaza. Palestine will be demilitarized, and Israel will have the right to destroy any Palestinian facility used for hostile purposes. There is a list of weapons and systems that the Palestinians are forbidden to procure. Palestine will not be allowed to make agreements with any state or organization that threatens Israel’s security. Any expansion of Palestinian security capabilities will require Israel’s permission. Israel retains the right to “engage in necessary security measures” to maintain demilitarization and fight terrorism, including incursions into Palestinian territory. There will be “early warning stations” manned by Israeli security personnel in Palestine.

Gaza has always been problematic, and with the Hamas takeover in 2007, it became a hostile enclave which has caused several small wars. The plan explicitly calls for the removal of Hamas, saying that Israel will not be required to meet any of its obligations under the agreement unless the Palestinian Authority is in control of Gaza, Hamas and other terrorist factions are disarmed, and Gaza is demilitarized. If Hamas will “play any role” in the government of Palestine, it must first agree to “explicitly recognizing the State of Israel, committing to nonviolence, and accepting previous agreements and obligations between the parties, including the disarming of all terrorist groups.”

The plan calls for Israel to release Palestinian (not Israeli Arab) prisoners held in Israeli jails, except those convicted of murder or conspiracy to commit murder.

There will be no “right of return” to Israel for people with Palestinian refugee status. Those registered as refugees with UNRWA will have the option of absorption into the State of Palestine or their present host countries, or to a limited extent, to other Organization of Islamic Cooperation states that agree to take them. Once the agreement is signed, Palestinian refugee status and UNRWA will cease to exist.

The Palestinian state will not necessarily be created upon the signing of the agreement; the transition from the Palestinian Authority to the State of Palestine will occur only after the Palestinians have created a Western-style democracy and legal and banking systems, and have stopped incitement and education for hatred in its schools and other institutions. Palestinians will be required to “create a culture of peace” which will not glorify terrorism or martyrdom, and will not deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

The agreement will include mutual recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the nation state of the Palestinian people. It will end all claims between the two, and this will be proposed as Security Council and General Assembly resolutions in the UN.

During the period of negotiations or for a maximum of four years, Israel will commit not to build or expand settlements in those areas of Judea and Samaria that are proposed to become part of Palestine. This “settlement freeze” does not apply to settlements in the Jordan Valley, eastern Jerusalem inside the security barrier, or other areas that are expected to become part of Israel. It does apply to Israeli enclaves in Palestinian areas. This is different from previous “freezes” which were applied to the entire area across the Green Line.

At the same time, Palestinians will agree not to join international organizations without permission from Israel, will end its legal actions (e.g., in the International Criminal Court) against Israel, and end the “pay-to-slay” program.

The US will agree to reopen the PLO mission in Washington and provide various kinds of aid.

What do the Palestinians think?

Of course they vehemently reject it. They couldn’t possibly accept the plan without almost as many caveats are there are items in it. The proposed Palestinian “state” is no more a state than Vatican City. The requirements to end what we consider incitement (and they consider education in the fundamental principles of the Palestinian Movement) will be unacceptable to them. Pay-to-slay is inviolable. The “right of return” has always been sacrosanct. Hamas will never disarm. And Palestinians have never been prepared to admit that Israel belongs to the Jewish people, not one inch of it.

What does the Left think?

Leftist organizations in Israel and the US oppose the agreement because of the small size of the proposed Palestinian state and the limitations on its sovereignty, and – in the case of the American Left – because they hate the president and have to oppose anything he does.

What does the Right think?

Many members of the Israeli Right oppose any Palestinian state, because they believe that the restrictions on sovereignty and militarization ultimately aren’t maintainable, and the result of allowing its creation would be another terror entity on our border. They also disagree in principle with any concession of territory that’s part of the Land of Israel. But some think it’s worth the gamble in order to restart building in at least part of Judea and Samaria, and to obtain sovereignty in the Jordan Valley and other parts of Area C.

What do I think?

The plan can’t possibly be translated into an agreement that the Palestinians would agree with, even as a pretense. It pays lip service to the idea that Palestinians want normal lives in a well-run, economically flourishing state. Certainly there are those that do want this, but the leadership and what Barry Rubin, z”l, used to refer to as “the young men with guns” who determine what happens on the street do not feel this way. In Palestinian politics and culture, nothing overrides the prime objective, which is the removal of the Jewish presence from the land that Palestinians believe belongs to them alone. Anyone who says different may be held accountable by the young men with guns. To accept the plan would be to betray their Palestinian identity and their Islamic religion in return for an attenuated, emasculated “state” that would be dependent on the hated Jews.

Having said that, I think the authors of the plan understand Palestinian political culture, and what they want to do is help the West to stop appeasing it. The proposal breaks the sterile consensus that has developed since Oslo, in which the conflict is seen as entirely Israel’s fault, nothing is expected from the Palestinians, and “solutions” are just different approaches to forcing Israel to make concessions. One example of this is that for the first time since 2000, the proposal rejects the holiness of the 1949 armistice lines, and calls for secure borders instead. In my opinion, the paradigm shift embodied in the proposal is its most important and worthwhile feature.

The objection that a Palestinian state, once created, would not remain benign and demilitarized is definitely a concern, but it will not become relevant for some time. Judging by the conditions placed on the Palestinians before they will be granted whatever bit of sovereignty they will have, it’s hard to imagine that it will actually come into being. Accepting the deal now would allow to Israel to take actions immediately, like building in areas that are expected to be part of Israel, annexing the Jordan Valley, and applying Israeli law to existing Jewish communities.

The significance of the deal, therefore, is not that it will ever be fully implemented. It is that it will change people’s thinking about the conflict, and free Israel from the chains of the Oslo/Clinton paradigm.

Israelis, therefore, should welcome the change in direction and take the opportunities offered, even if they have problems with specific parts of the program.

The PM promised to bring the program to the Cabinet for approval on Sunday, and I will be happy to see this.

Maps

How the proposal views the final configurations of Israel and Palestine:

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

Tweet and Delete

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Israel has experienced very heavy rains recently. Several people were killed when they were swept away by floods. In a particularly gruesome case, a young couple died of exposure after being trapped in a water-filled elevator in a basement parking garage. The emergency telephone system was not able to handle the volume of calls generated by the massive storm, and rescuers weren’t alerted until it was too late.

Last Friday afternoon, Qais Abu Ramila, an 8-year old Arab boy from eastern Jerusalem went missing. First responders and hundreds of Arab and Jewish volunteers searched for him until the next morning, when he was found dead, drowned in a deep pool of rainwater near his home.

Another tragedy. Possibly, as his parents said, the Jerusalem municipality should have filled in the pit. Often things aren’t done that should be, and the results are heartbreaking. One hopes lessons are learned.

But there was another side to the case of Abu Ramila, where lessons need to be learned but probably won’t be. Shortly after he disappeared, rumors started that he had been kidnapped by a group of “settlers.” Someone produced a security video that showed a boy being pulled along by the hand by an older man; but the boy’s father said that the child in the video was not his son. Nevertheless, despite a complete lack of evidence, the rumors spread. Some Arabs even tried to enter a nearby Jewish neighborhood in search of the “kidnappers.”

And then social media amplified the blood libel into an international event. Former Palestinian Authority official Hanan Ashrawi retweeted a fanciful tweet by “@RealSeifBitar” – possibly a fake account, presently nonexistent – which accused “a herd of violent #Israeli settlers” of assaulting the boy and throwing him into a well to die. She was followed by others, including professional (since he no longer has a job in the British Parliament) Jew-hater George Galloway, and, shockingly, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who retweeted Ashrawi.

When it became clear that the boy’s death was accidental, Ashrawi deleted her original tweet and tweeted a partial apology, saying “My apologies for retweeting something that’s not fully verified. It seems that the news of his being kidnapped is not certain.”

Not fully verified? Not certain?  How about, “a dangerous lie and murderous incitement?” But at least she went this far. Rashida Tlaib simply deleted her retweet. The shameless Galloway left it up and even pinned it to the top of his Twitter account.

Ashrawi and Tlaib are media veterans who fully understand how this plays. In case you don’t, let me lay it out:

First, someone tweets a false accusation. The tweet stays up for a day or so. Many people see it and believe it, especially if the author is a well-known personality like Ashrawi or Tlaib.

Next, the author deletes the tweet. Nobody can see it. The only ones who miss it are those who want to document after the fact that the author engaged in incitement to riot and perhaps terrorism to “revenge” the “crime” committed by Jews.

If the author wishes to prevent damage to their reputation, they may issue a retraction, as Ashrawi did. But of course the unemotional and tentative retraction has little impact compared to the original accusation.

Tweet and delete. If someone complains, shrug. Anyone can make a mistake.

There is no excuse for what they did. They know how the Palestinian rumor machine works. They know that @RealSeifBitar is not a real journalist, and that his vicious language is not that of a reliable source.

They should know that the blood libel that leads to the murder of Jews, sometimes to the destruction of whole Jewish communities, has a long history in both the Christian and the Muslim worlds.

But they don’t care, because it serves their purpose. Because it serves the Palestinian Cause. Because – maybe they would even admit this if you asked – truth for them is not independent of the observer. Truth for a Palestinian is identical with what helps the Cause. And that is defined as what hurts Jews and Israel.

So it is fine to make up massacres that didn’t happen (Jenin, 2002) as did pro-Palestinian journalist Phil Reeves, or to make movies about them like Mohammad Bakri. There’s no problem with accusing Israel of opening the dams to flood Gaza, even when there are no dams in the area. And if you get caught in a lie, no big deal. Just move on.

Tweet and delete. Because the Palestinian Theory of Truth says you can.

Posted in Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 1 Comment

A Nobel Prize for Donald Trump?

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

“…the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.” – the will of Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded several times for accomplishments in Middle East peacemaking. It’s been given to some truly deserving people, like Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, to some undeserving ones, like Shimon Peres, and to some who – if there were such a thing – in truth deserved the Hitler/Stalin Prize for evil, like Yasser Arafat.

Because of its anti-nationalist and anti-Western bias, the chance that the Nobel Committee will award the prize to US President Trump is microscopically small. But I think that an dispassionate examination will show that they ought to think about it.

Before I explain what I suppose will be considered my contrarian position, I should note that Nobel said nothing about ethical business practices, avoidance of conflict of interest, or general likeability. He did not require monogamy, or insist that a Nobel Laureate refrain from vulgarity in expression, or other unsavory things that Trump could be credibly charged with. The prize is awarded to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” by promoting peace; and as I will argue, nobody has done more in recent years to reduce Middle Eastern conflict than Donald Trump.

The biggest threat to peace in the Middle East today comes from the Iranian regime: its expansionism, support for terrorism, and of course its nuclear weapons program. Less serious, but still relevant, is the ever-ongoing Arab war against Israel. Trump has acted in a way that promotes peace in both of these areas.

The Obama Administration agreed to a deal (the JCPOA) which removed painful sanctions from Iran in return for an agreement which – in the best case – would have merely delayed Iran’s breakout as a nuclear weapons state for a decade. In fact, the agreement was full of holes relating to inspections and verification, so it is doubtful that even the hoped-for delay would have been realized.

The removal of sanctions mandated by the deal enabled Iran to invest its newly available funds in training and arming terrorist militias in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, in missile development, in undercover terror cells around the world, and in its nuclear program, taking advantage of the various loopholes in the agreement.

Trump exited from the deal, re-imposed sanctions, and took other actions – for example, the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani – which have greatly weakened the Iranian regime and thrown a monkey wrench into its plans, at least temporarily.

The Iranian regime wants a nuclear umbrella to protect it against the US and Israel, while it implements its plan to dominate the region and its oil resources, to push out all American influence, to destroy Israel, and to establish a Shiite caliphate that will replace Saudi Arabia as the center of the Islamic world.

Apparently, the Obama Administration believed that the interests of the US would be served by aligning itself with the Iranian regime against former American allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, even if this meant providing Iran a safe path to acquire nuclear arms. On the face of it, this seems absurd, but the administration’s actions throughout the eight years of its tenure can’t be interpreted in any other way. The deeper motivations of Obama and his people remain a matter of (dark) speculation. But Trump’s leaving the JCPOA and his killing of Soleimani unambiguously mark the repudiation of this policy.

The Iranian regime’s Hezbollah subsidiary has been exporting terrorism, particularly against Jewish targets on every continent except perhaps Antarctica. Arch-terrorist Soleimani was pulling the strings at the center of this web, and his elimination was a serious blow to it. He was in the process of setting up proxy militias similar to Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria when he received his 72-virgin salute.

Soleimani was in charge of foreign operations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), but was also considered one of the three most powerful men in the regime, who might even become the successor to Ali Khamenei. The IRGC is also responsible for suppressing dissent and protests within the country, and Iranian dissidents cheered the death of Soleimani, which they saw as greatly weakening the regime.

Trump’s tweets of support in Farsi to the Iranian people (as opposed to the lack of support shown to Iran’s Green Movement in 2009 by the Obama Administration) also bolstered popular opposition. Although the regime is highly oppressive and not loath to shoot protesters, the present unrest is its most serious challenge since the 1979 revolution.

Trump hasn’t limited his activism to the problem of Iran. It used to be fashionable to claim that the “plight of the Palestinians” was the primary source of instability in the Middle East, and that when it was “solved” (always at Israel’s expense), all of the various players in the region would lie down together in peace. And while this theory ignored things like the Sunni/Shiite conflict, Iranian expansionism, and radical Sunni groups like ISIS, it is nevertheless true that the Palestinian Arabs created chaos for decades, leveraging the Cold War, and now the Iranian-American conflict, to keep their anti-Israel war going.

In 1970, the PLO fought a mini-war against Jordan. Then it moved to Lebanon, where it started a vicious civil war whose embers still smolder and threaten to flare up. In 1982, it provoked Israel into a destructive war in Lebanon. During the 1980s, Palestinian terrorists brought their murderous activity to Europe as well as the Middle East, hijacking planes and even a cruise ship, and murdering Jewish athletes.

Part of the Obama/Ben Rhodes plan mentioned above to realign US interests included “solving” the Palestinian problem by weakening Israel and creating a Palestinian state. The idea was originally enunciated in the Iraq Study Report that Rhodes contributed to in 2006. Forcing Israel back to pre-1967 lines was part of the plan.

Obama and his people ignored the fact that Palestinian objectives didn’t stop at the Green Line (maybe they were aware of this and thought that the original creation of a Jewish state was a mistake anyway). They ignored the Iranian regime’s oft-stated intent to “wipe Israel off the map.” They followed a course that would reinforce the belief of both the ayatollahs and the PLO/Hamas that they would be given Israel on a platter, a dangerous tactic that could bring about a regional war that might dwarf the “big wars” of 1967 and 1973.

Trump short-circuited all of this. He cut funding to UNRWA, the UN agency dedicated to building an army of stateless “Palestinian refugees” to use as both a diplomatic and military weapon against Israel. He rectified the embarrassing failure of the US to admit reality, recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and move the US Embassy there. He signed the Taylor Force Act to keep American taxpayers from subsidizing Palestinian terrorism. He recognized Israel’s possession of the Golan Heights, essential for her security. His State Department rejected the idea that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were automatically illegal. In short, he took steps to put an end to the decades-long policy of encouraging the PLO and Hamas in their belief that a combination of terrorism and diplomacy would ultimately evict the Jews from the land of Israel.

Trump may have cut the Gordian Knot in the Middle East. If the American voters give him time to follow through, he may be able to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and perhaps help the Iranian people throw off the oppressive revolutionary Islamic regime. He might even end the Arab war against Israel, after some 100-odd years.

And if he succeeds, nothing could be more fitting than Donald Trump becoming the fifth American president to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Posted in American politics, Iran, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics | 1 Comment

Some Optimism, for a Change

Posted on January 19, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

In the last few days a fleet of explosive and incendiary balloons and kites have floated over our border fence with Gaza to land in Sderot, Ashdod, and other spots. Nobody has been hurt yet, but these devices are attractive to children. It’s only a matter of time before they claim their first human victims (over the summer, incendiary devices burned fields all over southern Israel, destroying crops and killing countless animals). The IDF bombed a Hamas installation in retaliation. They made sure nobody was there to be hurt.

The new laser weapon – the “ray gun” I’ve been waiting for since the days of Flash Gordon movies – apparently isn’t operational yet. A version of it is expected to be able to burn the balloons and kites out of the air before they cross our border. It will also be usable against rockets and mortar shells, so it will be an adjunct to the Iron Dome system, our insanely expensive defense against cheap rockets. The laser is affected by weather conditions and has other limitations, so it can’t entirely replace Iron Dome.

Israel has a layered anti-missile defense system which includes Iron Dome, the Patriot missile, the Arrow and Arrow III, David’s Sling, and soon the newly developed laser devices. Iron Dome has recently been improved, and is even more effective than its previous 90% success rate.

Effective anti-missile systems are a part of our deterrent strategy. The theory says that if the enemy knows that their attack won’t achieve much, they won’t try to attack us – at least today. Of course, it’s well known that improvements in offensive and defensive weapons and tactics follow upon one another. The longbow, machine gun, tank, and aircraft all changed the face of warfare, as well as giving birth to technologies to counter them.

It seems as though nobody is as good at creating defensive systems as Israel. And of course they are important. It doesn’t matter that we have the capability of turning southern Lebanon into  a wasteland if Hezbollah can destroy our major cities and infrastructure while we are doing it. Defensive systems keep us alive while the offensive ones defeat the enemy and win the war.

But there needs to be a balance, both technologically and strategically. Do we have the offensive capabilities to defeat our enemies? And will we use them?

Today those enemies are Iran and her proxies. Our nuclear deterrent, assuming that there is such a thing, would not be employed except in the worst possible situation, when our country is in danger of being overrun or being attacked with weapons of mass destruction. So I will leave this out of the discussion.

Our ground forces are small compared to the number of fighters that Hamas and the PA (I am assuming they will act on behalf of Iran in the event of war), Lebanese Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and possibly others (e.g., the ISIS militia in the Sinai) can deploy against us. In a multi-front war our forces would be spread thinly. Our experience in the 2006 Lebanon War showed that we can’t discount Hezbollah’s ability to fight and even to surprise us with effective tactics. Many of their fighters have been seasoned by fighting in Syria. We can assume that Iran will do its best to supply them with effective weapons.

Our air force is probably the best in the world (or almost – the only competition is the USAF), but it will be up against sophisticated Russian antiaircraft systems like the S-300 and possibly the S-400, which will limit its ability to fly everywhere, at least until we can destroy the batteries. Even when we have command of the air, it will not be easy to find and destroy all the rocket launchers that will be pummeling our home front, as we discovered in 2006. We will need to operate over Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and possibly Iraq and Iran (which is near the limit of the range of our manned aircraft).

Of course, nothing I said above is unknown to our military planners. They will have developed or are developing answers to the S-300 and S-400. Manned aircraft and pilots are a scarce resource, and Israel is coming to rely more and more on drones, which have long ranges and are much cheaper – Israel builds them herself – than manned aircraft. I suspect that in the next war, drones will become even more important, and Israel’s superiority in this area will be decisive in the future.

One area in which we are deficient compared to our enemies is rockets and missiles. Israel has chosen to invest more heavily in manned aircraft and drones, which offer greater precision in targeting – and also allow missions to be cancelled at the last moment to reduce collateral damage. Most of the rockets in the hands of Hezbollah and Hamas are so inaccurate that they are only useful as terror weapons against civilian populations.

Israel has also invested in naval systems, mostly in a defensive role. Now that we have offshore gas platforms, resources must also be allocated to protect them, which include ships and anti-missile systems.

Our enemies can be expected to attack us at what they believe to be our weakest points. That means to attack our home front and to try to create casualties among our ground forces, since they believe that they can win by destroying our will to fight. We can expect ground incursions into our territory. One important tactic for us will be to integrate smaller armed drones with ground forces, so that they can provide their own pinpoint air support.

Thinking more strategically: today we are in a defensive mode. We are trying to avoid civilian and military casualties, while developing our capabilities – defensive and offensive – and finishing infrastructure projects, like the tunnel barrier on the border with Gaza. We are not interested in hot war at this point, because there are weapons to develop and deploy, infrastructure to build, even flooded aircraft to repair. The generals always want a little more time.

On the other hand, our enemies aren’t standing still. And here comes the optimism: they weren’t, until recently. With the death of Soleimani, the pressure of sanctions, the revolt of the masses who are sick of the corrupt, oppressive, and – what else can I say, stupid – regime, the Iranian programs to project power in Iraq and Syria, to introduce precision-guided missiles into Lebanon, and to develop nuclear weapons, are stalled.

At the same time, the friendly administration in the US has taken some of the pressure off of us. During the previous one, I would get up every day and ask “how are they going to try to hurt us and help our enemies today?” That is no longer true.

The killing of Soleimani was a psychological watershed for me. For the first time, I think I can say that time is on our side. I even sometimes allow myself to entertain the thought that the Iranian people will succeed in throwing off their chains and we will not need to fight that next war after all.

Sometimes. But we live in interesting times. The next administration in Washington could make Barack Obama look like Theodor Herzl. War could start by accident. A revolution in Egypt could change all our equations. We don’t know, so we must be prepared for anything. At some point we will have to go over from defense to offense. I’m sure our generals understand this. I hope they do. Defense is important, but doesn’t win wars.

At a time like this, wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual government?

Posted in Iran, Terrorism, War | 1 Comment

Will the Iranian Regime’s Obsessive Jew-Hatred be its Undoing?

Posted on January 16, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Qassem Soleimani was a terrorist’s terrorist, a single man who was directly responsible for numerous acts of terrorism against the West and Israel, but – more importantly – who had the resources of a state at his disposal in his project to develop asymmetric warfare assets in other Middle Eastern countries. He was quite successful in building up Hezbollah in Lebanon into what is arguably the first truly existential threat to the Jewish state since 1973. He was in the process of doing the same for Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, when Trump wisely put an end to his mischief.

But he had another goal, apart from weakening Iran’s rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel, getting control of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and forcing the US out of the region. That was to target the Jewish people worldwide. In addition to attacking Israeli diplomats in several locations, Soleimani’s terrorists murdered Jews in Argentina, Bulgaria, Panama, and Lebanon. Of course his prime Jewish target was Israel, and although his support for Hezbollah plus various Palestinian factions could be seen as part of Iran’s struggle to dominate the region, it could also be understood as part of an overall anti-Jewish project.

Israel, as the Ayatollah Khameini well understands, is the locus of Jewish power in the world. Expressing this idea in 2018 with typical antisemitic imagery, he tweeted that

Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen. …

The supposedly moderate Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has also used this metaphor, as did his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials have likened Israel to a dog, and their expressions of hostility toward Israel are far more vicious and “personal” than those directed at their other regional adversaries. The regime regularly holds Holocaust cartoon contests despite the fact that Western countries, even those relatively hostile to Israel, find this kind of antisemitism offensive, and damage the image Iran wishes to project as a modern, progressive nation.

This is an antisemitic regime, and inviting and subsidizing visits from members of the Neturi Karta faction – representatives of which attended Soleimani’s funeral – can’t wash it away.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz wrote a book called “The War Against the Jews 1933-1945,” one of whose theses is that Hitler’s ravings against the Jews were more than, in Irving Howe’s words, “mere bait for the masses,” but rather, “the Nazis’ deepest, most ‘authentic’ persuasion.” The murder of millions of Jews was not an epiphenomenon of Hitler’s expansionist aggression, but rather one of his main war objectives.

It seems to me that the hostile expression of the Iranian revolutionary regime toward Israel is like that. In this case it draws its hatred from the well of Islamic doctrine rather than the combination of crackpot economic and racial theories that fueled Hitler’s enthusiasm, but it is still significantly more than just propaganda to support practical geopolitical ambitions. Like Hitler’s, the Jew-hatred of the Iranian regime is not an epiphenomenon; it is the “authentic persuasion” of Khameini (and was of Soleimani, too, until Trump’s Hellfire missiles came along).

It’s instructive to note that the “Quds Force” that was commanded by Soleimani and which is responsible for covert operations and unconventional warfare (read: terrorism) throughout the world is named after al quds, Jerusalem. It’s an obsession with them.

The statements of the Jew-haters in Iran are more honest and straightforward than those from the Palestinian Authority or the still more disingenuous BDS Movement. Ahmadinejad famously threatened that Israel “would be erased from the map,” not that Israel would be forced to “end the occupation.” It’s often said that one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust was that when Jew-haters make threats, it’s foolhardy to ignore them. Therefore we must not ignore the nuclear threats of the Iranian regime.

You may notice that I say “the regime” and not “Iran.” This is because while the regime in Teheran pumps out anti-Jewish propaganda every day, the Iranian people are arguably the least antisemitic in the Middle East! So says the ADL’s Global 100 poll, which found that “only” 60% of Iranians showed attitudes or beliefs that they considered antisemitic. This compares to 93% for our Palestinian peace partners, 74% for the Middle East and North Africa as a whole, 19% for countries in the Americas, and a worldwide average of 26%. Iranians are far less antisemitic than Jordanians (81%) and Egyptians (75%), with whom we are supposedly at peace. Yes, 60% is a high number, but given the conflict and the regime’s propaganda, it is surprisingly low.

Iran was a highly developed country before the 1979 popular revolution, with a relatively well-educated and liberal population. The government of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was an absolute monarchy (“shah” means “emperor”) in which dissent was harshly suppressed; but when it was overthrown by a popular revolution, many commentators – and probably many Iranians – were surprised to see it replaced by an Islamic regime that was no less harsh. The Shah had been a relatively enlightened king, a modernizer who improved the economy and introduced women’s suffrage. The new regime quickly established clerical rule and decreed mandatory hijab for women.

Today the Islamic regime is in trouble, its economy devastated by sanctions, and popular anger has risen against the choice of the regime to spend large amounts of money to develop militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen; to fight a hot proxy war against Saudi Arabia and a warm one against Israel; and to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Although the regime has been successful in getting Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, and others (Palestinians, too) to die for it in its military adventures, it has to arm and pay them.

Probably a majority of the money it is spending on military programs goes for its strategic encirclement of Israel and the provision of arms with which to try to neutralize Israel’s great military advantage. It’s probably reasonable to count a large part of the expensive nuclear and missile programs as Israel-related as well. So if it should happen that the Iranian people overthrow the Islamic regime, it will be in part because of the regime’s irrational anti-Jewish obsession (and in part because of the actions of Donald Trump).

And this brings up an interesting parallel. Some historians think that Hitler’s obsessive desire to kill all the Jews led to his irrational and disastrous decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. Others point out that the diversion of resources to murdering Jews greatly damaged his war effort and even led to his defeat on the critical Eastern Front.

It would be particularly ironic if the most dangerous and destabilizing force in the world today, the primary source of the unending misery of the Middle East, were to founder, like Hitler, because of its obsessive Jew-hatred.

Posted in Iran, Jew Hatred, Terrorism | 2 Comments

Regime Change in Iran Must Become an International Objective

Posted on January 12, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

The shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial airliner immediately after takeoff from the Teheran international airport is still shrouded in mystery. 176 passengers and crew died in the ensuing crash after one or two missiles from a sophisticated Russian Tor-M1 antiaircraft battery exploded near the plane. The Iranian regime initially denied any connection to the incident, but in the face of overwhelming evidence was forced to admit that their air defense system had downed the plane.

The Iranians said that it was a human error in which a “junior officer” mistook the plane for an American cruise missile. According to Brigadier-General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, “The operator identified the plane as a cruise missile but was unable to contact the central air defense command to confirm it. So he had to choose between shooting it down or not, and he choose [sic] to do it, Hajizadeh said. The operator had 10 seconds to make a decision.”

“I take full responsibility and I will obey whatever decision is taken,” Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said in remarks broadcast on state television. “When I found out what had happened, I wanted to die. I said, I would rather die rather than be a witness to such an incident.”

Nevertheless, there are considerations that make it hard to understand how such a “mistake” could have been made. A cruise missile flies much faster than a commercial aircraft, and would have been at a lower altitude. Several other commercial flights had taken off from the airport that day, and surely operators would have been familiar with the profile. The plane had a functioning transponder which “squawks” its identification, which would be available to military radars as well as the airport tower (which had just communicated with the pilots). The Tor-M1 battery near the airport would be integrated with other radar equipment in the local air defense system, and the blip would have been marked for the operator as a commercial airliner. According to a source familiar with the system, it would have required the operator to make a “command override choice” to override the identification in order to select it as a target.

Perhaps an poorly-trained operator panicked? Hard to believe. Or for some reason someone wanted to destroy a commercial flight? We don’t know, and we may never find out.

Protests in Iran have broken out from anger about the government’s lying and responsibility for the crash in which 82 of the 176 people killed were Iranians. This is after protests against high gas prices led to the deaths of 1,500 Iranians at the hands of security forces. Iranians, especially educated ones and students, are showing their frustration with a regime that has expended resources on expansionist wars while oppressing the population at home.

The regime’s expansionism threatens the peace of the region as well as the world. It is engaged in terrorist mischief-making around the world, and the regime has forced one of the greatest nations in the world to become a captive of a medieval Islamist ideology that should not exist in the 21st century. It is the epicenter of world antisemitism. And it is pursuing nuclear weapons to make it even more dangerous. Iran’s aggression is precisely the kind of behavior that the UN was created to combat. And yet, more often than not, the UN’s mechanisms work to abet rather than to hamper it.

The most desirable outcome would be for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime of the ayatollahs and establish an enlightened, democratic government in its place. Failing that, almost any government that would be concerned with the welfare of its people rather than exporting its revolutionary Islamism, dominating the region, destroying Israel, and threatening the rest of the world, would be an improvement.

Rather than seeking to expand trade with Iran, as the European countries have done, the civilized nations of the world should cooperate to isolate and pressure the Iranian regime economically. Dissident forces in the country should receive support and encouragement to overthrow it. It may also be necessary to use limited force in order to prevent the regime from producing nuclear weapons. It seems clear that nothing short of that will stop them, since they see nuclear weapons as an impenetrable umbrella for their overall design, and they may be right. Therefore, they are willing to make almost any sacrifice – that is, to force their population to sacrifice – in order to achieve this goal. Time is short.

Although the general principle that nations should not interfere with the internal affairs of other nations is a worthy one, Iran under the revolutionary regime pursues policies that make it an existential danger to other nations. Ignoring its behavior and allowing it to continue, especially along with the development of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them all over the world, is foolhardy.

As far as I can tell, the main obstacle to a concerted international effort is the financial benefit that some countries and influential individuals derive from their relationship to the regime. But nations that see themselves as the responsible adults of the world must put aside the short term gains that come from cooperation with the regime and instead work together with the Iranian people to remove it. Regime change could be accomplished without invading Iran, and without destroying the country’s infrastructure and killing millions, because a significant proportion of the population would be on board.

The US is the most powerful and important country in the world, and has the power and influence needed to lead a campaign against the Ayatollahs. President Trump appears to understand the need to take action, but unfortunately his political opponents are automatically against anything that he’s for, regardless of the intrinsic merit of his policy. In the case of Iran, the antagonism is particularly strong because the Obama administration chose to appease rather than confront the regime. The same “echo chamber” that gave us the JCPOA (the nuclear “deal”) is back and is working overtime.

I am certain that my argument will fall on deaf ears in the case of those who see Trump as the Devil. This is particularly unfortunate, because the situation will change drastically for the worse once Iran goes nuclear.

Posted in Iran | 3 Comments