Hawks clamor for escalation, stuff about Syria, Neo-con accuses BBC of antisemitism

It's hard to know where the motives of defense people begin or end... Another memo leaked out from that sieve of a British government, which said that they are looking for a way to withdraw troops. We've got a little bit about Syria, as well.

BAGnewsNotes is usually interesting photo analysis, including this pic of an Iraqi soldier in some house, as well as photos of Bashar Assad and the memorably titled "Move Over Zarqawi: The New Iranian President And The 1979 Embassy Take-Over."

Brad at Bradblog interviews Joe Wilson.

I would recommend looking at Syria Comment, which is down at the moment but quite good. Josh Landis has a lot of interesting stuff, including a really good story translated from French press about Syria's history and political development. A huge feature on Syria & Assad by lead NY Times reporter James Bennet is really quite good.

Prof. Juan Cole talks about increased sectarian violence in Iraq, as well as the fact that apparently his site is being censored by some military computer administrators in Iraq itself--the soldiers are cut off. (via Dkos) As he says:

I have a lot of .mil readers, and know for a fact that the blog is valued by many intelligence professionals in DC, so it is a shame if it is not available at some bases.

Good stuff from Billmon at Whiskey Bar: The Devil's Flypaper. I didn't know that Bush's nasty new counterterror specialist, Fran Townsend, had quite likely pressured Abu Ghraib personnel to give detainees that special care. Evidently she's still upholding the flypaper theory. As Billmon put it,

"I don't know how you would even begin to de-program someone capable of believing, with fanatical certainty, two completely contradictory statements: i.e., that because there are terrorists in Iraq, they can't be in London blowing up the subways -- even though they're in London, blowing up the subways."

There's a good column by Dionne about this in WaPo:

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Fran Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, said that the war in Iraq attracts terrorists "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London."
Huh? If British troops fighting in Iraq did not stop the terrorists from striking London, then what is the logic for believing that American troops fighting in Iraq will stop terrorists from striking our country again? Intelligence reports -- and Townsend's own words -- suggest that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground since the American invasion. How, exactly, has that made us safer?

This is also a weirdly racist or at least dehumanizing argument: Townsend is stating that there aren't massive civilian casualties in Iraq? Can we actually be sure she believes Iraqis are real human beings?

This was a good article in The American Conservative about how the phenomenon of suicide terrorism is most closely linked to foreign military occupation -- or the perception of foreign military occupation.
Oh good, one of Bush's top intelligence advisors is lobbying to help China buy UNOCAL.

I feel like throwing in a true classic: Judith Miller's famous NY Times article about Saddam purchasing those damn aluminum tubes.

Arch-neocon Michael Ledeen is accusing a wide set of the British public, including the BBC, of sweeping, deeply rooted antisemitism... and who better to exemplify this than Ahmed Chalabi?!?

The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.

This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington. Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.
All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.

IRAQIS — THE NEW JEWS?
And so Israel was not on the prime minister's list [of damaged countries]. What about Iraq?

The Iraqis are viewed much the same way, and are at some risk of becoming the new Jews of the Middle East. In the enormous hate literature directed against the neocons, Ahmed Chalabi is part and parcel of the anti-Semites' hateful vision. No matter that he is a Shiite, and no matter that he was rudely dismissed by the Israeli government before Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was in cahoots with the Jewish cabal, and was therefore "one of them." And as Chalabi, so the rest of the lot. ..... When is the last time you read anything, anywhere (with all too few exceptions — like Arthur Chrenkoff's "good news" beat), celebrating these rare qualities of spirit? And this question goes hand in hand with its twin: When is the last time you read anything about the incredible performance of the State of Israel, similarly under siege and similarly stressed by the crisis that surrounds it?
[......]
This sickness is certainly not limited to Great Britain; we find it here as well, in such personages as Pat Buchanan and Juan Cole, along with their acolytes.

It is a bit depressing to hear Ledeen resort to tarring the BBC with the Nazi brush. Where does Macalester prof. Emily Rosenberg, for example, fit into his rubric of Jew haters? In a fine moment during the International Roundtable conference last year, she took him to task for his shady prescriptions of global Trotskyist-inspired revolution, the war and all the rest. Naturally Ledeen also calls for attacking Iran after the London bombings (via Prospect.org).

It's also a little weird to hear him claim that the AP story about Israel getting tipped off by Scotland Yard was basically the product of an antisemitic mind. It was just an AP story, not 21st Century Goebbels. The antisemitism gun is pretty much the first refuge of a scoundrel, the rhetorical fog deployed to cover for a handful of nasty bureaucrats in Washington - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Moonies and their newspapers. (note: Among Holocaust researchers it is accepted to spell "antisemitic" as such, or as "anti-semitic" -- "Semitic" doesn't need to be capitalized because the term was first developed by bigots anyway)

More about post-London hawks randomly calling for overthrowing Tehran without really explaining how, or why the hell it would even be feasible, helpful, good, etc...

Kos bans some people who have been posting raving conspiracy theories in the diaries, as well as those recommending said diaries. This seems like a decidedly hazardous step for DailyKos, as one of the people on the huge reaction thread put it:

Or maybe my definition of a conspiracy theory is different. Definitions are important, because a large portion of "acceptable" diaries on this site could be defined as conspiratorial in nature, by right wing ideologues or even average joe types. Check the recomended list, Congressman Conyers diary asks for a timeline of Bush Administration actions up to the war, specifically looking for evidence of fixed intelligence. The President lies and it ends up in the death of close to 2000 military personnel, thousands badly injured, and billions of tax payer dollars sunk into the sand and the pockets of corporations linked to administartion officials. Sound like a wacked out conspiracy theory?

But this response makes some damn good sense:

The point is (so far as I can tell) not to ban all discussion of conspiracies at all.
Markos believes in several conspiracies, at least.
The point is that if you are speculating about a conspiracy, or promoting others who do, you have an obligation to either:
a) cite some documented facts that lend credence to your assertions
or
b) recognize that you are engaging in rank speculation and that therefore
b-sub1) especially if it is inflammatory and not backed up by any real investigation - 
b-sub2) and most especially if you are nasty to those who challenge you to back up your claims - b-sub3) people here will come down on you

True enough... but the question about the barrier between conspiracy and plain political speculation's a tough one... Eh whatever...

Right-wing Israeli march towards Gaza Strip on Monday; a month until Gaza pullout

Lots of stuff going down in Israel: Haaretz editorializes that with the Gaza closure, "The evacuation has begun" in earnest.

People like Nadia Matar, Moshe Feiglin, Noam Livnat, Uri Ariel and Effi Eitam, all of whom recently moved to Gush Katif, did not come to contribute to the routine of daily life, but to stir up the residents and organize resistance activities. The prime minister correctly assessed the risks inherent in this development and did what was necessary.

The settlers cannot continue to play a double game and expect empathy. They cannot build a tent city for opponents of the disengagement near the Strip, organize a march of thousands of people to Gush Katif, incite soldiers to disobey orders, and bring thousands of new residents, whom the IDF will then have to evacuate, into Gaza and then expect the government to sit with folded hands. The army and the police must focus on the main task, not waste their strength on nuisances. The complaints of the opposition's leadership, including the comparison of the Strip's closure to the siege of Jerusalem, to ghettoes and to concentration camps, are hardly unexpected.

These are exceptionally difficult days, with a high potential for violence and a constant fear of bloodshed.

I thought that this column by Akiva Eldar, "Impressions from the mid-Jerusalem roadblock," about Sharon's sudden, bizarre plan to build a huge wall through the middle of the city was really quite interesting. Also it shows Israeli polls showing wide support for peace negotiations and withdrawals from the territories. But it is an incredibly weird portrait of life in Jerusalem. This look by Meron Benvenisti how life will get messed up by a new Jerusalem fence, including the idea of a "soft transfer", strengthening the Jewish element of Jerusalem while dissolving its Arab element.

Analysis: Timing of Gaza closure was defined by Yesha leadership
The timing of the Gaza Strip's closure was determined by the chief of staff of the Yesha Council of settlements, Bentzi Lieberman, rather than the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Dan Halutz. The minute the council announced its plans for a mass march to Gush Katif, it was clear that the IDF would advance the closure of Gaza and block access to Gush Katif before the marchers reached it. The question of why the council scheduled the march for next week, rather than allowing Gush Katif residents to enjoy a normal life for as long as possible, as many residents had requested, has two answers.

The first is that the march was scheduled to coincide with the Knesset debate on a bill to postpone the disengagement. The Yesha Council, unlike the militant right, believes that the battle will be won or lost in the Knesset, not in the streets. The council's hope is that a mass march will influence some MKs to vote for postponement. How? The council has no real answer, but it hopes that by creating an atmosphere of crisis, of a country on the verge of an explosion, some MKs will be persuaded that postponement is preferable.

More below the fold.....

"It is all Israel," Fragmentation of Palestinian agricultural land behind the West Bank fence by Amira Hass:

Listen to the soldier in the field. He says what his commanders were trained to cover up and embellish. Listen to the red-headed soldier, who prevented residents of Qafin from passing through the gate in the separation fence last month to get to their lands. These are 5,000 out of 8,200 dunams of agricultural land in a village in the northwestern West Bank. These are lands belonging to the families of these residents for several generations, and for so-called security reasons they were separated from the village - as has happened, and will happen, with hundreds of other Palestinian villages.
[.......]
But the red-headed soldier didn't discuss only the gate. He didn't hide the geopolitical worldview in whose name he is commanded to safeguard the gate's welfare. "There is no entry to Israel from here," he said. When he was told that the farmers don't want to enter Israel, but to walk 200 meters to get to their age-old lands, a few kilometers away from the Green Line, he responded: "To be politically correct, it is all Israel."

How right the soldier is. From his standpoint, on the security road that links up with bypass roads for Jews only, which in turn link up with settlements and Israel proper, this is what he and his colleagues watch every day: The space called "Israel," from the river to the sea, containing all kinds of "crowded population concentrations" surrounded by fences and imprisoned behind locked gates.
[......]
The residents of Qafin have come to one conclusion: The goal is to bring about the neglect of their green agricultural lands until they become wilderness. Then Israel can rely on an old Ottoman law that allows neglected and abandoned land to become public property, in order to make the wilderness bloom. In Israel, as every soldier knows, the "public" is the same as the "Jews." And so will the mistake of 1948 be rectified. At that time, some 18,000 dunams from Qafin became part of Israel, became Jewish land. Now it will happen to an additional 5,000 dunams.

Noam Livnat is the brother of the Israeli education minister, and he was just arrested for violating a restraining order barring him from entering Gaza after a violent confrontation:

Noam Livnat, brother of Education Minister Limor Livnat, was arrested yesterday in the Gaza settlement of Shirat Hayam, following a violent confrontation between his supporters and police. Livnat, a resident of Yitzhar in the West Bank, had violated a restraining order barring him from entering Gaza. Livnat is a leader of the Defensive Shield and Jewish Heart movements, which encourage soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements. Over the past two years, the organizations have collected more than 20,000 signatures from soldiers saying they would refuse such orders.
[......]
After his arrest yesterday, Livnat said, "The government is nervous because of the success of the Jewish Heart campaign to spread the word about refusal of orders. The arrest is an attempt to shut us up, but it won't help, and on the day of reckoning thousands will refuse orders."

Haaretz editorializes that they wish that the Israeli government won't knock down the houses in the settlements they are going to abandon in just over 30 days. "IDF chief denies link between London attack and Mike's Place [Tel Aviv] bombing". After this bombing, "Israel may renew policy of assassinations."

A leftist MK comments about how the settler movement has succeeded in blurring the Green Line in the perceptions of Israelis:

Despite the settlement project's failure to establish the territories and the settlements as a legitimate part of the State of Israel, it appears it did succeed in one thing: With the encouragement or tacit agreement of all the governments, it blurred the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border) - which is, in fact, the one and only clear border that can be drawn, and the only border on the basis of which it is possible to arrive at an agreement that will be acceptable to the two sides and also win international recognition.

Even now it is clear that at least in certain areas of the West Bank - Ma'aleh Adumim, the neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the Etzion Bloc - the Green Line will not go back to being an agreed-upon border. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to evacuate these areas, and Israel will have to give other territories in exchange for them. In the rest of the areas of the West Bank, the only chance for a peace agreement is based on the distinction in the consciousness of the Israeli and Palestinian publics between sovereign and legitimate Israeli territory and occupied territory, the status of which has yet to be determined. It is possible only to imagine what would happen to this mental distinction between Israel and the territories if settlements had not been erected in them. Returning from these imaginings to the reality reveals a surprising and worrisome success on the part of the settlement project - undermining the Israeli public's perception of the Green Line as an agreed-upon peace border between Israel and its Palestinian neighbor. It is no accident that at the behest of all of the education ministers, the Green Line vanished from the maps that are displayed in Israeli schools.
[........]
We are now at a historic crossroads. Never before has a single Jewish settlement been evacuated. The disengagement plan is the first test of the dismantling of imposed settlements that are stuck like a bone in the throat in the midst of a foreign Palestinian territory. Therefore, the disengagement must be carried out to the letter, completely and at the designated time, before a new generation arises that did not know 1967, and before our children and our grandchildren are condemned to live by the sword forever, without even understanding why.

Despite all the nasty business about how criticism of Israel supposedly equates to antisemitism, as Mr Ledeen has resorted to lately, I think what's really antisemitic is how the American media never bothers to air the opinions of the Israeli left at all -- they are virtually invisible here. Yoel Marcus, unfortunately, also labels Blair an antisemite:

When Tony Blair cites the conflict in the Middle East ("the Israeli occupation," of course) as one of the three reasons for Islamic terror, he is no different from your common anti-Semite.

Other than that its an interesting column. Adjustments have to be constructed with the Egyptians. It seems that Egyptian border police will guard the Gaza-Egypt border after the withdrawal, instead of the regular Egyptian police. An interesting Anti-Defamation League poll about Israel, conducted in the US and Europe, shows that

71 percent of those polled expressed support for the disengagement plan, 52 percent believed Israel was working harder for peace than the Palestinians, and 43 percent said they sympathized with Israel.

"It is apparent from the survey that Israel's bold initiatives to bring security and peace to its people resonate with the American people," said Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL's national director, at a Jerusalem press conference.
[.....]
Support for Palestinians among Americans also increased: 68 percent said they thought Palestinians were serious about peace negotiations, up from 62 percent in the previous survey.
[.....]
Foxman said yesterday that "light years" separate European and American public opinion in relation to Israel. Foxman estimated that if more terror attacks occur in Europe, the tendency to blame Israel indirectly for them will increase. 

Among the 500 respondents in the 12 major states of the European Union, including Hungary and Poland, only 13 percent sympathized with the State of Israel, compared to 25 percent who sympathized with the Palestinians. Only 19 percent of the respondents said they saw Ariel Sharon as a positive figure, compared to 39 percent who saw him as a negative figure. In 2004, 8 percent saw him in a positive light, compared to 39 percent who viewed him negatively.