Making the Case Against Genocide, by Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post)
“Esteemed friends of Israel, such as Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, could get no information from the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defense Ministry or the IDF’s Spokesman’s Unit. No one could be bothered to talk to them. No one had time to help them help Israel.”
Excerpts;
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an evil man. But he is not a stupid man. Indeed, he is smart and fastidious. He understands power and how to get it. And he understands that the purpose of a nation’s foreign policy is to sell ideas and messages and to build coalitions that enable a state to achieve its national aims. Due to his understanding and his abilities, Ahmadinejad has achieved significant success in advancing his policy aims of defeating the United States, destroying the State of Israel, and acquiring nuclear weapons.
The source of his frenetic motivation for destruction is his deep-seated and fanatical desire to hearken the arrival of the Shi’ite messiah – the twelfth imam or the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad promises that the arrival of the Mahdi will signal the enduring defeat of liberal democracy and the notion of human freedom and the eradication of Christianity and Judaism. All will be replaced by the “pure” Islam of the Mahdi, of Ahmadinejad and of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the realm of international public opinion, Iran’s position is anything but weak. This was made clear last Saturday in London during a public debate between London’s pathologically anti-American and anti-Israel Mayor Ken Livingstone and US Islamic scholar Dr. Daniel Pipes. During the debate, Livingstone noted in a laconic manner that evoked no outrage that he thinks that the establishment of the State of Israel was a mistake.
Speaking at the Herzliya Conference Tuesday, former minister Natan Sharansky explained the significance of statement’s like Livingstone’s for Israel’s national security. Sharansky warned that today international opinion is more sympathetic to the view that Israel should be destroyed than European opinion in 1939 was to Germany’s exhortations that the Jewish people should be expunged from Europe. As a result of the Arab-Islamic-Leftist campaign to demonize Israel that has been going on systematically for more than six years, today throughout the world there is a large and growing sense that wiping Israel off the face of the earth wouldn’t be particularly objectionable.
MANY MEMBERS of the audience who heard Sharansky’s remarks on Tuesday serve in official capacities vested with responsibility for contending with this terrible state of affairs. So the question that must be asked is what are they and the politicians they serve under doing to contend with the growing specter of national destruction? Unfortunately, on the level of international diplomacy the answer is precious little. Israel’s top leaders spend most of their time spreading baseless promises that everything is under control. Aside from that, they engage in either feckless or counter-productive diplomatic activity.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for instance, has visited world capitals and told us that he is building a coalition. Yet, all evidence is to the contrary. When he visited Germany – a potential coalition partner against Iran – Olmert failed to give the Germans any reason to work with us against Iran. His visits to Russia and China were preordained failures since there is no chance that those countries – who are assisting Iran economically, militarily and diplomatically – will lift a finger to prevent Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
For their part, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Deputy Premier Shimon Peres are working to build international coalitions to join forces not against Iran, but against Israel. All three are encouraging the US, Europe and the Arabs to pressure Israel to give Judea and Samaria to Hamas and Fatah – Iran’s Palestinian proxies.
A proper Israeli foreign policy would serve to check and undermine Iran’s international maneuvering. It would work to bring about Iran’s delegitimization and isolation in the international community. It would work to dry up Iran’s bank accounts and so unravel the stability of the regime and then act to overthrow it through popular insurrections. An effective, coherent foreign policy would be aimed at building solid international coalitions in which Israel could be part of an international military effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. Or, at the very least, it would prepare international public opinion for a unilateral Israeli military campaign against Iran.
There is a small group of prominent Israelis who currently serve in no official capacities who are privately acting to delegitimize and isolate Iran internationally. Members of this group include opposition leader and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sharansky, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon, MK Dan Naveh and former UN ambassador Dore Gold. These men are pushing to have Ahmadinejad indicted under the Genocide Convention for inciting to genocide by calling for Israel’s destruction. Many also work tirelessly to explain the magnitude of the Iranian nuclear threat not only to Israel, but to the entire world.
On the economic warfare front, Netanyahu is waging a one-man war – and rather successfully at that – to push forward an international campaign to divest from companies doing business with Iran. A study conducted by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy showed that US public employee pension funds are heavily invested in such companies. Divestment from these companies could potentially cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses for Iran.
Netanyahu met with the state treasurers of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Connecticut on Tuesday in Boston and urged them to divest their public employee pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. If all five states were to divest their funds, Iran would stand to lose $71 billion.
There are a significant number of prominent public figures – both Jewish and non-Jewish – in the world that fervently wish to join forces with Israelis to defend against Iran and the forces of global jihad more generally.
Esteemed friends of Israel, such as Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, could get no information from the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defense Ministry or the IDF’s Spokesman’s Unit. No one could be bothered to talk to them. No one had time to help them help Israel.
In a similar fashion today, angry voices are emanating from the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office complaining about Netanyahu’s efforts. Olmert, Livni and others have repeatedly accused Netanyahu of alarmism and are seeking to silence Israel’s most effective defender in the international arena today.
Today, the genocidal propaganda emanating from Iran, the Arab media and the radical Left is no less foolish and flimsy. If we are wise enough to fight it as a nation and a state, there is no doubt that we will be victorious. All Ahmadinejad’s coalitions and evil intentions cannot help him against a roused Jewish people.
But if we want to win, we need to fight.
Commentary;
Once again, Caroline appears to put all of her apples in Bibi’s leaky wheel-barrel. But then again, while there is no way that this author wants Bibi as prime minister, there are things that no Israeli can do better than Bibi. So rather than show their utter corruption and evil, Olmert, Livni, Peretz ought to be totally behind Netanyahu’s efforts rather than accusing, stifling and attempting to “silence Israel’s most effective defender in the international arena today.”
She has written these words or words like them in the past; “if we want to win, we need to fight.” It sounds very much like words from this author’s Parsha HaShevua on Parsha Bo;
It’s not enough for people to want change; to succeed, this want must be soo compelling that all else is secondary such that masses of people in the hundreds of thousands are willing to put themselves on the line, step up to the plate for days, weeks, months, as long as it takes to forceably bring about change; change in government, change in Israel’s institutions, change in the non-existent leftist, Arabist Israeli justice system, change in the IDF and change in leftist, agendized media. These are the “five-fingers” which Moshe [Feiglin] often speaks of.
What seems lacking in modern-day Jews in Eretz Yisrael as opposed to the Jews of Shushan who united, fasted and wore sack-cloth as did Mordechai? Why don’t we feel as compelled as the Jews of Shushan? Or to the people of the Ukraine who forced new elections by the force of hundreds of thousands demonstrating 24/7 for days, weeks, months — as long as it takes to force change, to force new, honest elections?
MB