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A Necessary Crisis with Iran

Shortly after the first round of nuclear talks with Iran had concluded one of the American negotiators said: “… I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before.”

The word that bothered me most in that declaration was “candid.”

How did Iranian foreign minister start kick of the negotiations? He started it with a widely reported PowerPoint presentation titled “An End to the Unnecessary Crisis and a Beginning for Fresh Horizons.”

There’s a word that sticks out there too, “unnecessary.”

Calling the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program “unnecessary” is hardly conciliatory. It’s absolutely contentious. Remember that Zarif has been hailed because of his Western background. Surely he knows the implications of different words. He didn’t call his presentation an “unfortunate” crisis, which would suggest a misunderstanding. “Unnecessary” is a slap at the United States and the West for not trusting Iran’s intentions regarding its nuclear program.

That is problematic on two counts. The first is that it presumes that there’s no reason to suspect that Iran has been sneakily been inching its way towards a nuclear weapons. The latest ISIS report estimates that if Iran chose to make a bomb it could conceivably enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb in a month’s time.

But it also assumes that the nuclear issue is the only point of contention between Iran and the West. It isn’t.

Marine Col. Geraghty: Unknown to us at time, NSA intercepted #Iran's instructions to attack our barracks in #Beirut. http://t.co/Kz4tWTaeFD

— Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs (@jerusalemcenter) October 23, 2013

Last week was the 30th anniversary of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. That anniversary should remind us of Iran’s enmity of the United States.

To be sure President Obama said many of the right things when he commemorated the attack.

Thirty years ago today, 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers lost their lives to a Hizballah suicide bomber who attacked the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Minutes later, 58 French paratroopers lost their lives when a second Hizballah suicide bomber attacked the French barracks. This despicable act of terrorism was the deadliest single-day death toll for the U.S. Marine Corps since the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima. Our Marines and their fellow service members were serving in Beirut as part of a multinational force during the Lebanese civil war, to help bring stability to a troubled region and to defend our strategic interests in the Middle East. They came in peace.

Oct 23, 1983: bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut. Attack led by Hossein Dehghan. Current Job? Iran Defense Minister http://t.co/e2MrkTdcKY

— CAMERA UK (@CAMERAorgUK) October 24, 2013

However, it wasn’t just Hezbollah behind the attack.

Not only was it one of the deadliest attacks against the U. S. Marine Corps, it was a huge explosion, possibly the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.

This wasn’t happenstance or coincidence, it was decisive enemy action. The resources and logistics to pull off an attack like that were significant.

And they were provided by a government: Iran’s.

Matthew Levitt outlined the relationship between Iran and Hebollah:

The attacks, perpetrated by Hezbollah under orders from Iran, announced the arrival of the Lebanese Shiite group as a potent, anti-Western terrorist force supported and directed by Tehran. Today, despite warming relations between the United States and Iran, Hezbollah remains a weapon in Iran’s arsenal, a means to pursue the agenda of the Islamic Revolution in Syria and in terrorist operations around the world.

Despite the current charm offensive of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — and suggestions by some that the Islamic Republic is moderating its stance — it is highly unlikely that Iran will ever give a thought to reining in Hezbollah.

Founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Hezbollah has always had an intimate relationship with Iran based on a shared ideological foundation. Today, Hezbollah is no longer just a proxy of Iran; it is in a “strategic partnership” with Iran, as National Counterterrorism Center director Matthew Olsen put it. Or, in the words of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Hezbollah and Iran are in “a partnership arrangement…with the Iranians as the senior partner.”

Remembering the 1983 #Beirut Barracks Bombing, when #Hezbollah, i.e., #Iran, killed 241 US Marines | http://t.co/kN0fOBXVeL via @tabletmag

— dbe928 (@dbe928) October 23, 2013

But Hezbollah isn’t run by some rogue organization within the Iranian government. It is run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose leaders, even now, are powerful figures within Iran’s government.

Col. Tim Geraghty who had commanded the peacekeeper spoke last week at a ceremony honoring their memories at Camp Lejeune:

That includes current leadership in Tehran. Retired Col. Tim Geraghty, who commanded the international peacekeeping mission and the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit that lost 220 Marines that day, said Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, the new Iranian defense minister, is the former Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who helped oversee the attack.

Geraghty spoke at a remembrance ceremony at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., on Wednesday.

“The past three Iranian ministers of defense, including the current one selected a few months ago, all have peacekeepers’ blood on their hands and are leading the Iranian lockstep march for the acquisition of nuclear weapons,” Geraghty said.

Remember that the next time you read about how “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani is or how “western” Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif is. Rouhani appointed a minister who escalated a thirty year war against the United States. The substance of that action is more significant than moderation in Rouhani’s tone.

30 Years After Beirut Bombing, Hossein Dehghan, Rouhani's Defense Minister's Role #Iran #US #Hezbollah #Syria http://t.co/BkaE4BVFz8

— Sharif Behruz (@sharif_behruz) October 25, 2013

Unfortunately, the failure to stand up to Iran didn’t just start now, though. Warren Kozak wrote:

After the bombing, a debate took place within the Reagan administration as to how to respond. The leading advocate for vigorous retaliation was the secretary of state, George Shultz. The defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, argued against any further entanglement. Weinberger prevailed.

President Reagan, who had told the world the United States would never back down to terrorists, did exactly that when he pulled everyone out four months later.

All the Lebanese factions saw this. The Iranians saw it. A little known Saudi, Osama bin Laden, saw it as well. Later, bin Laden would tell ABC News, the fact that “the Marines fled after two explosions” showed the “decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier.”

The desire to consummate a deal with Iran regardless of its previous subterfuges in its nuclear dealings and regardless of its ongoing war against the United States is disturbing.

Iran Pres appoints Gen Hussein Dehghan-Def Min-the man respon 4 Beirut 1983 Marine barracks bomb’g-still want 2 trust Iran

— The Bear (@TheOregonBear) October 23, 2013

Navy vet, Jim Burton, in a powerful remembrance on Facebook recalled the friends he lost that day and wondered:

Today Hizbollah is stronger than it was at the start of the last war with Israel. Iran, more bellicose than ever, not only pours more money in but leaves no question as to its desires and goals. Yet we ignore their words, and worse, excuse them. We neither speak, see, nor hear any evil from those who name us enemies. It’s insanity.

Today I remember those friends lost way too soon. I’ll also pray that no more are taken from us… but if some are, I’ll pray that we find the resolve to confront and defeat those who have so long and continuously sought to destroy us all.

Are our leaders so focused on making a deal that they will ignore the nature of the Iranians sitting across the table from them?

See pattern? Photo Marine barracks Beirut attack http://t.co/TAAmPOMyT9 Then, Iran/Hezbollah AMIA bombing Argentina http://t.co/xoPElHLIEz

— Yleem Poblete, Ph.D. (@YleemPoblete) October 23, 2013

It isn’t just America’s interests being risked, but the interests of America’s allies as well. As Fouad Ajami concluded in his op-ed last week:

The gullibility of Mr. Obama’s pursuit of an opening with Iran has unsettled America’s allies in the region. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates there is a powerful feeling of abandonment. In Israel, there is the bitter realization that America’s strongest ally in region is now made to look like the final holdout against a blissful era of compromise that will calm a turbulent region. A sound U.S. diplomatic course with Iran would never have run so far ahead of Israel’s interests and of the region’s moderate anti-Iranian Arab coalition.

In Washington, the threats represented by Tehran’s theocrats are forgotten in this time of undue optimism, as is the Assad regime’s continued barbarity. With the Russian-brokered “deal” on Syria’s chemical weapons, Mr. Obama has merely draped American abdication in the garb of reason and prudence.

Those who run the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear program, like most others in the region, have taken the full measure of this American president. They sense his desperate need for a victory—or anything that can be passed off as one.

Will the nuclear negotiations with Iran usher in a new era of comity or just embolden a determined enemy to keep up its war against us?

Limited by Legalisms

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed is probably one of the most devastating indictments of the President’s Syria policy published. I don’t think that the reporters set out to critique the President and the tone of the article is always respectful.

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/393101410037821440

Still there are two descriptions that really stuck out. The first was a general critique.

As one former senior White House official put it, “We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it.”

Over the past two years the article describes the various rationales the administration had for not intervening and that sentence turns out to be a very apt theme for the way the administration acted, or, more precisely, chose not to act.

Then there was this:

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

One would have assumed that a Syria policy was one of the two most important foreign policy issues facing the President. (The other is the question of Iran’s nuclear policy.) Being “disengaged” during such momentous discussions is worse than being engaged but making bad decisions.

In Syria meetings, Obama "scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching & chewing gum"
http://t.co/9WPYPpU2hT

— Toby Harnden (@tobyharnden) October 23, 2013

One of the themes that emerges from the article is that the President was greatly influenced by Denis McDonough. McDonough’s instincts were not to intervene. (It was McDonough who convinced the President not to order an attack on Syria even once his “red line” of chemical weapons use had been crossed.)

Another is that the President was bound by legal concerns. For example:

But debate had shifted from whether to arm Syrian rebels to how to do it. Discussions about putting the Pentagon in charge of the program — and publicly acknowledging the arming and training program — were eventually shelved when it was decided that too many legal hurdles stood in the way of the United States’ openly supporting the overthrow of a sovereign government.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t know that it was legalisms that discouraged the administration from acting, or if they were a convenient pretext for the President’s preference for not intervening. (Similarly, I don’t know how much McDonough influenced the President and how much he simply reinforced the President’s own distaste for intervention.) Still it put the administration at a disadvantage by making decisions that were guided by “legal hurdles” when the regime it was responding too cared nothing for such niceties.

I don’t know that Fouad Ajami read the New York Times, but his indictment of the administration A Lawyer Lost in a Region of Thugs would have been a great title. (Google search terms.) Ajami focused on Iran not on Syria, but still Syria played a role in his critique.

In a lawyerly way, the Obama administration has isolated the nuclear issue from the broader context of Iran’s behavior in the region. A new dawn in the history of the theocracy has been proclaimed, but we will ultimately discover that Iran’s rulers are hellbent on pursuing a nuclear-weapons program while trying to rid themselves of economic sanctions.

True, the sanctions have had their own power, but they haven’t stopped Iran from aiding the murderous Assad regime in Syria, or subsidizing Hezbollah in Beirut. And they will not dissuade this regime from its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In dictatorial regimes, the pain of sanctions is passed onto the underclass and the vulnerable.

Just as he has with Iran, President Obama now takes a lawyerly approach to Syria, isolating Assad’s use of chemical weapons from his slaughter of his own people by more conventional means. The president’s fecklessness regarding Syria—the weakness displayed when he disregarded his own “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons—was a gift to the Iranian regime. The mullahs now know that their nuclear program, a quarter-century in the making, will not have to be surrendered in any set of negotiations. No American demand will be backed by force or even by force of will.

The President’s ongoing inaction regarding Syria not only encouraged Assad, but reassured Iran too, that it has nothing to fear from this administration.

Does the United States believe that “no deal is better than a bad deal” with Iran?

The West (otherwise known as P5 + 1) has concluded its first round of talks with Iran about its nuclear program in Geneva.

The New York Times reports After Talks on Iran’s Nuclear Program, Officials Highlight the Positive:

“I’ve been doing this now for about two years, and I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before,” said a senior Obama administration official.

What was accomplished?

In an appearance two weeks ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wendy Sherman, the State Department official who led the American delegation here, sought to head off a Congressional move to impose tougher economic sanctions on Iran by vowing to seek a “freeze” of the country’s nuclear program so the Iranians could not use the negotiations as a cover to make further advances.

Mr. Zarif, however, provided no indication on Wednesday that Iran had agreed to suspend any nuclear activities during the talks here with what are known as the P5-plus-1 countries, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and Germany. The senior Obama administration official declined to discuss the issue.

Why is this important? An editorial in the Washington Post earlier this week explained:

A year ago, Iran’s growing stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent appeared to be the most dangerous piece of its nuclear infrastructure, because that material could be quickly converted to bomb-grade. The enrichment takes place in an underground facility that has little plausible use other than for weapons production. A freeze or shutdown of that plant and the securing of the material already produced, if accepted by Tehran even six months ago, would have eased the threat that Iran could race to produce a bomb sometime soon.

Since then, however, Iran has begun installing a new generation of centrifuges at its largest enrichment plant, in Natanz. Because they can process uranium far more quickly, these new machines create a threat of an Iranian nuclear breakout beyond that posed by the 20 percent stockpile. Meanwhile, a new reactor based on heavy-water technology, in Arak, is due for completion next year and would allow Iran to produce plutonium that could be used in bombs.

Yet the New York Times reports that the West might not have even gotten a freeze on current nuclear research out of the Iranians. Furthermore the New York Times reported that it isn’t clear that Iran would agree to halt or limit enrichment or accept intrusive inspection to ensure that enrichment is limited. What is clear is that Iran wants a quick lifting of sanctions. The only reason for optimism is if the Americans (and the West) see that making a deal is the goal and that they know that they are willing to meet Iran’s terms for a deal.

https://twitter.com/MitchGins/status/390475507495489536

Yesterday, Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov wrote Four Possible Deals with Iran (Google search terms). After noting that there was a good deal (total elimination of Iran’s nuclear program) and a less good but reasonable deal (a reversal of Iran’s nuclear progress so that it’s “breakout” timeline was extended from a few months to a few years) Yadlin and Golov explained what a bad deal would look like:

A bad agreement would have the West ease sanctions against Tehran in exchange for a partial dismantlement of its nuclear program. Such a deal could, for example, limit Iran’s uranium-enrichment level to a nonmilitary grade, but wouldn’t put a cap on Iran’s stockpile of centrifuges or wouldn’t force the regime to shut down the Arak reactor. This would be disastrous for Western interests, because it would allow Iran to manufacture a nuclear weapon rapidly and whenever it wants, under the cover of an agreement with the international community.

https://twitter.com/MitchGins/status/390471181327155200

Reading the public statements over the past few days, it’s hard to get the impression that we’re headed to anything other than a bad deal. The public statements of Iran’s foreign minister indicate that Iran is not prepared to make any sort meaningful concessions and that he expects an easing of sanctions in order for the West to build trust with Iran. There’s no mention of Iran’s cheating on its nuclear program which led to the sanctions in the first place.

Western negotiators seem determined to make a deal and Iranian negotiators are determined to have sanctions eased or lifted. Despite Secretary of State John Kerry said that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” I fear that we are headed for a bad deal.

The New York Times’ War Against Binyamin Netanyahu

Last week in an article On Iran Talks, Congress Could Play ‘Bad Cop’, the New York Times quoted an “expert” named Cliff Kupchan:

It is a role that Congress shares with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who warned the United Nations that Mr. Rouhani was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and urged the United States to ignore his conciliatory words and redouble the pressure on Iran.

“Netanyahu’s speech was widely ridiculed in this town,” Mr. Kupchan said, “but it largely reflects the views of many members of Congress.”

I’m sure that in some Washington circles – those who believe words and meaningless agreements are more important than actions – Netanyahu’s speech was ridiculed. But I’m not convinced that it was widely ridiculed.

https://twitter.com/artcarson/status/389435871557980160

That comment was followed up by a fuller attack on Netanyahu, Netanyahu Takes a Lonely Stance Denouncing Iran.

With a series of major speeches — three more are scheduled next week — and an energetic media blitz, Mr. Netanyahu, 63, has embarked on the public-diplomacy campaign of his career, trying to prevent what he worries will be “a bad deal” with Iran. Insisting on a complete halt to uranium enrichment and no easing of the economic sanctions he helped galvanize the world to impose on Iran, Mr. Netanyahu appears out of step with a growing Western consensus toward reaching a diplomatic deal that would require compromise.

But such isolation is hardly new to a man with few personal friends and little faith in allies, who shuns guests for Sabbath meals, who never misses a chance to declare Israel’s intention to defend itself, by itself.

“Netanyahu is most comfortable predicting disaster, scaring people into doing something,” said Mitchell Barak, a Jerusalem political consultant who worked for him in the early 1990s and has watched him closely since. “The problem is now he’s lost momentum. His message is clear, his message is the same, the situation is the same, but everyone else’s perspective has changed. It’s like you’re the only one in a dark room with a flashlight.”

I don’t remember this Mitchell Barak, but he sounds like a one time supporter who soured on his former employer. In other words, he’s not exactly a disinterested observer.

NYT: Netanyahu Takes a Lonely Stance Denouncing Iran. Article notes PM studies Bible w/2 sons for 45min on Shabbat. http://t.co/bkAz4gTm1Q

— Joel C. Rosenberg (@JoelCRosenberg) October 13, 2013

Still how “out of step,” is Netanyahu?

Significantly, in his speech before the UN’s General Assembly two weeks ago, said:

Like everyone else, I wish we could believe Rouhani’s words. But we must focus on Iran’s actions.
And it’s the brazen contrast, this extraordinary contradiction between Rouhani’s words and Iran’s actions that is so startling. Rouhani stood at this very podium last week and praised Iranian democracy. Iranian democracy, he said.
But the regime that he represents executes political dissidents by the hundreds and jails them by the thousands.

Rouhani spoke of “the human tragedy in Syria.” Yet Iran directly participates in Assad’s murder and massacre of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Syria, and that regime is propping up a Syrian regime that just used chemical weapons against its own people.

Rouhani condemned the “violent scourge of terrorism.” Yet in the last three years alone Iran has ordered, planned or perpetrated terrorist attacks in 25 cities on five continents.

Rouhani denounces “attempts to change the regional balance through proxies.” Yet Iran is actively destabilizing Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, and many other Middle Eastern countries.

Rouhani promises “constructive engagement with other countries.” Yet two years ago, Iranian agents tried to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington, DC.

And just three weeks ago, an Iranian agent was arrested trying to collect information for possible attacks against the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. Some constructive engagement!

Yet everything that Netanyahu said in those paragraphs – about Iran’s involvement in Syria, its sponsorship of terrorism, its destabilization efforts in the Middle East, the attempt on the Saudi ambassador and spying on the American embassy have all been reported by the New York Times. Does the New York Times believe that all it has reported on Iran’s state sponsored terrorism is false or, at least, inconsequential?

The real question is not why Netanyahu is “out of step,” but why people read a few moderate tweets and assume that they mean more than very aggressive and hostile actions?

Besides, Netanyahu is not as alone as the New York Times alleges. On Sunday, the Washington Post – representing a more grounded liberal consensus in Washington than the New York Times – ran an editorial, Iran’s commitment to disarmament must be tested before sanctions are lifted.

A year ago, Iran’s growing stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent appeared to be the most dangerous piece of its nuclear infrastructure, because that material could be quickly converted to bomb-grade. The enrichment takes place in an underground facility that has little plausible use other than for weapons production. A freeze or shutdown of that plant and the securing of the material already produced, if accepted by Tehran even six months ago, would have eased the threat that Iran could race to produce a bomb sometime soon.

Since then, however, Iran has begun installing a new generation of centrifuges at its largest enrichment plant, in Natanz. Because they can process uranium far more quickly, these new machines create a threat of an Iranian nuclear breakout beyond that posed by the 20 percent stockpile. Meanwhile, a new reactor based on heavy-water technology, in Arak, is due for completion next year and would allow Iran to produce plutonium that could be used in bombs.

Any accord with Iran, even an interim arrangement, must take these new facts into account. No sanctions relief should be granted unless Iran takes steps that decisively push back its potential time frame for producing the core of a nuclear warhead. That means that the advanced centrifuges and the Arak reactor must now be part of any deal.

This might as well have been taken from Netanyahu’s speech. It’s clear that the editors of the Washington Post don’t accept the premise of the New York Times that the goal of negotiations with Iran is not simply to reach an agreement, but rather to reverse Iran’s progress towards the creation of nuclear weapons. It also shows that Prime Minister Netanyahu is neither as ridiculed nor as isolated as the New York Times would like to pretend.

The hate the New York Times Dares Not Report

The New York Times today featured an article, Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate, which focuses on how dehumanizing an enemy makes it easier to kill. The article focuses on a convicted, jailed and released IRA terrorist and how he could be conditioned to kill. Then the article continues:

Historical parallels are inevitably flawed. But a recent flurry of horrific bloodletting — the attack in Nairobi that left 60 dead, the execution by Syrian jihadis of bound and blindfolded prisoners, an Egyptian soldier peering through his rifle sight and firing on the teenage daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood leader — raises a question as old as Cain and Abel: Do we all have it in us?

Many experts think we do. For Mr. O’Callaghan, it was a matter of focus.

“What you’re seeing in that moment,” he said in an interview last week, “is not a human being.”

The article also mentions how Nazis could be brought to slaughter Jews (and describes the murderers in oddly sympathetic terms!). But it left out the most systematic delegitimization campaign going on now: the one by Palestinians that targets Israel.

Amazing! No word about the genocidal hatreds of Palestinian mass media. "Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate" http://t.co/wineG4I1Os

— Richard Landes (@richard_landes) October 13, 2013

Two and a half years ago terrorists brutally killed four members of the Fogel family. After the killings, the Israeli government blamed the Palestinian Authority for the incitement that led to the horrific crimes. Here’s how the New York Times reported the issue:

Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired Israeli general given responsibility by the Israeli government for monitoring Palestinian incitements to violence and to hatred of Israel, said in a telephone interview that while Mr. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad, had been careful in their words, ”they too encourage an atmosphere of terrorism.”

He noted, for example, that a senior Abbas aide had paid a call to the families of three Fatah militants killed by the Israeli military, conveying condolences from Mr. Abbas. Israel held the three responsible for the fatal shooting of a rabbi in the West Bank in December 2009. In addition, Israeli officials note, streets, summer camps and youth tournaments in the Palestinian Authority have been named for people who committed terrorist attacks.

The new focus on incitement against Israel, together with Israeli dissatisfaction over the Palestinian response to the brutal attack, seemed to pose a question about the Israeli government’s readiness to deal with Mr. Abbas as a serious peace partner — even though Mr. Abbas and Mr. Fayyad are widely considered moderates who have repeatedly said they would never resort to violence.

Note a few things here. First of all, the reporter added the unnecessary qualification “Israel officials note.” These occurrences are not the result of charges made up by Israeli officials, but well documented facts reported by Palestinian Media Watch and others. The focus on incitement is nothing new; it was something that Netanyahu pointed out regularly when he was Prime Minister in the late 1990’s. No one listened, but that hardly means that the focus is new. Finally, somehow the incitement was twisted into a reason to doubt “Israeli government’s readiness to deal with Mr. Abbas,” rather than a reason to question Abbas’s “moderate” credentials. If the same standard in today’s article applied, the reporter 2 1/2 years ago wouldn’t have failed to make the connection.

If these journalistic sleights of hand weren’t enough, the reporter continued:

Mr. Abbas rejected the claims about incitement in mosques, telling Israel Radio that the Palestinian Authority mosques have adopted a unified text for sermons, written by the minister of religious affairs. He called for a joint Israeli-Palestinian-American working committee to investigate claims that Palestinian Authority school textbooks incited violence.

Did Abbas prove his lack of culpability? Of course not. As noted above, the incitement is documented. But the reported simply took his claim at face value.

In 2001, Charles Krauthammer made an important point about the killings of Kobi Mandel and Yosef Ishran, in The Boys in the Cave:

This is not war. This is not even terrorism. This is bloodlust.

It is savagery so grotesque that it might not have been believed had we not all seen that picture last fall on the cover of Time of the Palestinian, having just beaten to death the two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, exultantly holding out his blood-stained hands to the crowd in a gesture of triumph.

People are not born with bloodlust. They learn it. It is no mystery where the Palestinians have learned it. For years Arafat’s mini-police-state has been feeding his people the rawest Jew-hatred since the Third Reich. In television, radio, newspapers, and textbooks, Arafat has created the psychic infrastructure that sustains his endless war on Israel — and gives us the barbarism in the cave.

That’s the same point made in today’s article but as applied to Palestinian terror; the obvious example absent from today’s article.

I brought up two past cases, but this is still going on.

https://twitter.com/cerenomri/status/388691375442919424

Last week the New York Times reported, Israeli Man Fatally Bludgeoned in West Bank:

The man, Sariya Ofer, 61, was attacked around 1 a.m. by at least two people in the yard of his house at Brosh Habika, an isolated resort village that he ran and that was empty of visitors at the time. His wife, Monique, who escaped and called for help after reaching a highway, said Mr. Ofer had gone outside after hearing noises. …

Still, some right-wing politicians were quick to attribute the attack to terrorism, and they called on Israel’s leaders to refuse to release any more Palestinian security prisoners, which Israel has been doing as part of an American-brokered deal for the resumption of peace talks. The first group of 26 long-serving prisoners was freed in August; three more groups are expected to be released in the coming months. …

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not responded publicly to the calls from the right to suspend prisoner releases. But President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said in a television interview on Friday that if Israel did not go through with the planned prisoner release he would no longer keep his commitment to suspend Palestinian efforts to join international agencies during the nine-month period allotted to this round of peace talks.

The reporter leaves out any real evidence that there could be a relationship between the releases and the rise in terror incidents (outside of the claims of “right-wing” Israeli politicians). In fact the very same reporter gave a reason in August when she reported Israel Releases 26 Palestinian Prisoners, to Cheers and Anguish:

Still, here on the Palestinian side of the divide, the prisoners, most of whom had served 20 years or more in prison for deadly attacks against Israelis, were viewed as political prisoners who had sacrificed for the cause and a potent symbol of resistance to Israeli occupation. …

Also among those released was Yousef Said Abdel Al from Gaza, where hundreds of relatives and supporters waited to greet the freed prisoners at the Erez crossing. Mr. Abdel Al was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of Ian Feinberg, an Israeli lawyer who was bludgeoned to death with an ax in 1993 while working on a European aid project in Gaza. He was 30 and married with three children.

This was outrageous at the time and doesn’t look any better now. The murderers who were released were not by any reasonable definition “political prisoners,” and the reporter just took the claim and added the justification of “resistance to the Israeli occupation.” This isn’t reporting an extreme position but justifying it.

If one of these “political prisoners” bludgeoned someone to death, well the lesson was learned. Bludgeoning, by this perverse calculation, is a political act neither a criminal nor a terrorist act. But when writing about the response to last week’s killing, she presents Abbas’s response in a vacuum, even though she implicitly made the connection between incitement and terror two months ago. Again the New York Times is avoiding this obvious connection.

Incitement kills, according to the New York Times, except when Palestinians incite against Israel and Jews.