Yourish.com

1) Middle East arms deal

The United States is concluding an arms deal with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Hoagland: arms deal “weaken the only containment strategy Obama consistently practiced – the containment of Israel” wapo.st/12D0xtp

— Shmuel Rosner (@rosnersdomain) April 23, 2013

The New York Times reports U.S. Arms Deal With Israel and 2 Arab Nations Is Near:

While one goal was to ensure that Israel continues to field the most capable armed forces in the region to deter Iran and counter a range of threats, it was equally important to improve the capabilities of two important Arab military partners. Another challenge, senior administration officials said, was coming up with a package that could help Israel deal with various security challenges — but devised so it would not be viewed as an American endorsement of accelerated planning by Israel to strike alone at Tehran’s suspected nuclear facilities.

The objective, one senior administration official said, was “not just to boost Israel’s capabilities, but also to boost the capabilities of our Persian Gulf partners so they, too, would be able to address the Iranian threat — and also provide a greater network of coordinated assets around the region to handle a range of contingencies.”

Those other security risks, officials said, include the roiling civil war in Syria — a country with chemical weapons that could be used by the Assad government or seized by rebels — and militant violence in the Sinai Peninsula.

The Washington Post reports Hagel: Mideast arms deal ‘a very clear signal’ to Iran and adds some background:

Hagel has visited Israel several times previously, including during his 12 years as a Republican senator from Nebraska, but this is his first visit since he became defense secretary in February. Hagel was narrowly confirmed by the Senate after some pro­Israel groups vigorously opposed his nomination, arguing that he was insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state and too soft on Iran.

Speaking to reporters aboard his military aircraft, Hagel was reluctant to reopen that debate, saying that his confirmation hearing was “years ago.”

He also took pains to emphasize that the United States and Israel regard Iran as a clear threat that must be prevented from developing nuclear weapons. He stressed Israel’s right to self-defense and repeated that the Obama administration would not rule out military action to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs.

Yes, pro-Israel groups objected to Hagel’s nomination. But their “argument,” as the reporter put it, was Hagel’s record. Would the Hagel who objected to the undue influence of the Israeli lobby object to this deal that Secretary of Defense Hagel is concluding?

2) Good Kerry, Bad Kerry

Secretary of State John Kerry has gotten some flack from Turkey.

The New York Times reports Turkey Criticizes Kerry Over Request to Postpone Visit to Gaza:

The criticism came a day after Mr. Kerry, while on a visit here, told reporters that he had urged Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to delay the Gaza trip to avoid inflaming tensions at a time when the Americans were trying to revive talks between the Palestinians and Israel.

“Only our government decides where and when our prime minister or another Turkish official would go to, and is not in a position to seek permission or acceptance of any authority,” Mr. Erdogan’s deputy prime minister and government spokesman, Bulent Arinc, said in a televised statement. “Because both Mr. Kerry and the world know that Turkey has the power to do whatever it wishes at the desired time.”

Mr. Arinc’s statement may have been partly intended for a domestic audience, aimed at countering the possible impression that a visiting American secretary of state could give Turkey orders. It was also notable that the Turkish reaction was delivered by a lower-ranking official, an indication that the Turks did not want the issue to escalate.

True, Turkey is an independent nation, but so is the United States. Erdogan reportedly plans to visit Gaza after a visit to Washington. If Erdogan continues to defy the wishes of Washington maybe it would be appropriate for President Obama to reschedule the planned Washington trip, as long as Erdogan dismisses Washington’s concerns. It’s good to see Secertary Kerry articulating a good American policy.

Unfortunately not all of Kerry’s comments have been well considered.

Kerry’s equation of families of Mavi Marmara terrorists with Boston terror victims shows shocking moral imbecility. timesofisrael.com/deputy-ministe…

— Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest) April 22, 2013

3) The Mahnaimi problem

Turkey denied a report that was made on Sunday by Uzi Mahnaimi that Turkey agree to allow Israel bases from which to attack Iran. The Times of Israel follows up on its earlier report:

A Turkish official told the Hurriyet Daily News that the Sunday Times report was “a hypothesis” about the “step by step” process of the normalization of Turkish-Israeli relations.

“Talking about the prospects of a military cooperation at this stage would be irrelevant,” he added. “We are not there yet. We haven’t even yet appointed a new ambassador to Israel.”

I’m surprised that the denial wasn’t more categorical. Still it’s a stretch to claim that Israel has an agreement with Turkey for airbases, when its negotiators just got to Turkey.

The problem with repeating unreliable reports (as in the case of Mahnaimi) is that it gives the report a credibilty. Sure, by qualifying the article with the word “Report:” leading the headline you’re saying that it was true that this story was reported without guaranteeing the veracity of the details. But why do that, if you’re not also going to explain why the claim is dubious?

1) Getting it wrong

I missed the overnight development in the Boston Marathon bombing case.

In the early part of the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing the media were regularly getting things wrong and reporting them.
Daled Amos commented:

Pity the media – spoiled by Middle East reporting where not used to having to retract inaccurate stories after report first thing they hear.

— daledamos (@daledamos) April 17, 2013

In Principled Dupedom: On the Moral Imperative to be Stupid, Richard Landes, focusing on two famous cases – the supposed “massacre” in Jenin and the Al Dura case – showed what one has to believe in order to stick to faulty news reports.

All of this brings us back to the discussion of the process of auto-stupefaction I’ve referred to as rekaB Street. Rather than note the clues and the anomalies and pursue them fearlessly, most prefer not even to view the evidence, to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, or, in some cases, to take a couple of fearless steps and then demur from reaching any further conclusions. Heaven forbid we call Talal a liar and Enderlin a(n apparently willing) dupe! Better we remain stupid.

In other words, it’s preferable to follow the narrative than to follow the facts.

2) Today in Egypt’s history

In assessing today’s planned demonstrations in Egypt, Barry Rubin writes:

This is the chaos into which Egypt is descending. In real terms, a revolution hailed by virtually everyone in the West has turned into a disaster. The choices seem to be either a Sharia state or a civil war, each accompanied by suffering and explosive instability.

Might the West learn something from this story?

The editors of the Washington Post have learned something. They now acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood has not interest in democracy. In U.S. should focus on helping Egyptians protect their freedoms, they write:

The right way for the administration to regain its footing in Egypt is neither to pivot toward backing the secular opposition nor to seek accommodation with the government. Instead, the United States should have a policy centered on widening and preserving the democratic opening that followed the 2011 revolution. The administration should speak more, including from the White House, when free speech, free assembly or free elections are threatened; it should find ways to continue and increase its support for Egypt’s civil society. It should reach out more to opposition leaders, while making clear to them and to the military that non-peaceful means for challenging Mr. Morsi’s government are unacceptable.

I’m glad that they don’t endorse seeking accommodation with the government. Even supporting the democratic opposition cold be problematic as it is more likely to discredit the opposition than it is to help it in Egypt. But isn’t supporting “civil society” consistent with supporting the “secular opposition?” Though the impatience with the Muslim Brotherhood is welcome, the argument suffers a bit from inconsistency.

3) The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Israel

In The Jewish Hero that History Forgot, Yale history professor, Marci Shore profiles Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Edelman, who had survived by escaping through the sewers, was the last living commander of the uprising. After the war, in Communist Poland, he became a cardiologist: “to outwit God,” as he once said. In the 1970s and ’80s he re-emerged in the public sphere as an activist in the anti-Communist opposition, working with the Committee for the Defense of Workers and the Solidarity movement. He died in 2009, and to this day, he is celebrated as a hero in Poland.

He is remembered with more ambivalence in Israel. “Israel has a problem with Jews like Edelman,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret told a Polish newspaper in 2009. “He didn’t want to live here. And he never said that he fought in the ghetto so that the state of Israel would come into being.” Not even Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister and an admirer of Edelman, could persuade an Israeli university to grant the uprising hero an honorary degree.

Shore’s argument is that Edelman was ignored because he was not a Zionist.

A profile of Edelman at the American Jewish Committee website, suggests another reason he may have been somewhat overlooked:

His anti-heroic account of the uprising was not accepted by other combatants, including his closest friends. They mostly found their way to Israel, while Edelman, true to his Bundist past, believed Zionism was a mistake. I remember him telling us that the State of Israel was not really Jewish. “It’s an Arab state with the Jewish religion,” he said. He was also fervently anti-religious, even as he embodied the highest moral principles that we associate with religion.

Was it the Zionism or the iconoclasm? (Though it could be argued that his rejection of Zionism is part of what made him an outsider.)

Jeffrey Grossman questions the assumption that it was Edelman’s anti-Zionism that made him “forgotten.” The he writes:

I have no beef with Ms. Shore’s worthy opinion piece. But I can assure her that Edelman’s decision to remain in Poland after the war is now a non-issue in Israel. Israel is too concerned with existential threats emanating from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, which has 60,000 rockets and missiles pointed south, and the crumbling Assad regime in Syria, which still controls one of world’s largest arsenals of chemical weapons.

Jews may soon be fighting again for survival.

On the other hand, what does the Gray Lady mean when it writes “Not everyone who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saw a Jewish state as the ultimate goal” so soon after Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day? Is The Times hinting that notwithstanding a rising level of global anti-Semitism, there is today no need for a Jewish state?

If it was true, then I don’t have a problem with the writer acknowledging that not all of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were Zionists. What bothers me (and I think Grossman too) is why was this the defining quality of Edelman in the op-ed?

1) We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea

Yesterday Max Fisher wrote, Knowledge of pressure-cooker bombs is not limited to readers of al-Qaeda’s ‘Inspire’ magazine:

And “Inspire” was far from the first extremist publication to distribute instructions for making pressure-cooker bombs. Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine points out on Twitter that “The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” published in 1971, also included information on how to make them. The book appears to have provided the necessary instructions for at least one such bombing, in 1976 at Grand Central Station. In 1973, police had discovered a similar device in the New York Port Authority building.

Today, there appears to be a miniature subculture of Americans building small pressure-cooker bombs for the exclusive purpose of detonating them harmlessly in empty fields and posting video of the explosion to YouTube.

None of this is to dismiss the possibility that al-Qaeda or any other group could ultimately be connected to the Boston Marathon bombings. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the June 2010 issue of al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” was not exactly publishing privileged information when it discussed the horrific potential of gluing nails to the inside of a pressure cooker and placing it in a populated area.

I would point out that two of the better informed articles I’ve read on pressure cooker bombs also included this caution.

Eli Lake wrote in Al Qaeda’s Recipe for Pressure-Cooker Bombs:

Experts cautioned that it will take more analysis of the bomb to determine whether the pressure cooker bomb matches al Qaeda’s recipe. The people who will be performing that analysis reside at the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, the government’s most comprehensive database on bomb design.

Similarly, J. E. Dyer wrote in Boston will rise:

So we simply don’t know, and can’t guess right now, who did this. We can say that the bombing was relatively small in scope. The explosions were horrific for those in their immediate vicinity, but the bombs were not big ones, and there were only two. With each hour that passes, it becomes more evident that there is no larger plot requiring a group of terrorists of significant size.

I understand that Fisher is being cautious here. However, it contrasts with his post justifying the front page treatment of the picture of Jihad Misharawi holding his dead son. While he later acknowledged that evidence suggested that the child was killed by a Hamas rocket, he showed no such caution – despite the fact that as many as 15% to 30% of rockets fall short and the often false reporting of Hamas officials – to attribute the tragedy to Israel. The damage this does is that much of the Arab world uses these charges and images to perpetuate their grievances against Israel. But this didn’t concern Fisher last November.

Barry Rubin writes that (regardless of what the public thinks) official America needs to consider that Whoever Attacked Boston, The Revolutionary Islamist Terror War on America is Still in High Gear:

Since September 11, 2001, there have been 18 known terrorist attacks planned in New York City and they all have something in common, the worldview of the perpetrators. You can read more here about each one and how they were foiled.

2) A museum to a false history

A few years ago Hezbollah opened up a museum devoted to boasting of its victories against Israel. Last year, Sharon Weinberger wrote about Hezbollah’s terror tech museum:

The museum features different units of Hezbollah, including its missile unit. Hezbollah’s increasing rocket and missile capabilities were some of the defining features of the 2006 war and continues to attract attention. In 2010, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accused Iran and Syria of equipping Hezbollah with advanced weaponry. “We are at a point now where Hezbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world and this is obviously destabilizing for the whole region,” he said.

More recently, the Lebanese magazine, NOW featured an article about the museum.

“I came here to see what the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon did to free my land and my village,” visitor Kamel Mouradi said, referring to Hezbollah, which was founded by the Iranian establishment.

Up the hill from the Abyss is a walkway that leads tourists through a dense forest. Visitors walk past a hidden cove where former Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayyed Abbas Moussawi would pray and encourage fighters. Life-size replicas of Hezbollah militants are spread throughout the woods – some carrying missiles, others firing them and another, kneeling down to pray.

Not to be left out, Hamas now plans to build a museum devoted to its resistance, with Iranian help.

Minister Mohammed al-Madhoun visited Tehran and met with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Mohammad Hosseini, his culture minister, along with other Iranian officials. After more than five days of talks the Hamas minister signed a memorandum of cultural cooperation with Iran. They agreed to exchange delegations and have Iran offer training courses in various fields, especially film, for Gazans. One of the major promises was cooperation to build a museum to commemorate the “resistance.”

So too the Palestinian Authority is starting to build a museum of Palestinian history. An uncritical article in the Jerusalem Post reports:

“Initially, everyone wanted to make this museum in Jerusalem but we knew that the Israelis would make this impossible,” Omar Kattan, head of Palestinian Museum’s work team, told The Media Line. “After things became possible again in terms of the political situation, we re-opened this file and commissioned the study and developed a framework to do it.”

“We came up with a unique concept that is basically a museum without a collection, and a museum that is based on a network rather than a building,” Kattan said.

“The idea [evolved] from the “Memory Museum of the Nakba” to a museum that will use the tools of history to come out with a modern dialogue,” Jack Persekian, the director and curator of the Palestinian Museum told The Media Line. “We’re moving forward from representing an incident that happened in a certain time to representing the Palestinians wherever they are.”

Tzvi ben Gedalyahu observes in the Jewish Press:

It is a lot easier to convince the world that Israel is “occupying its land” if Arabs can show that the “Palestinians” existed 200 years ago and were not invented by Yasser Arafat. If you want to be particular, a case can be made that the term “Palestinian” was used in 1921 at the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, but then it must be taken in context at the time that Palestine is part of Syria.

“Palestine” used to be one of the two names of the land under the British Mandate — Palestina-Eretz Israel. The re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 all of a sudden reminded some Arabs that maybe they are Palestinians, but it was the Six-Day War in 1967 that gave Arafat the opportunity to fire up the concept.

All that was missing was a past, and the Palestinian Authority has become the master of inventing history.

Furthermore, Elder of Ziyon notes:

When museums are built in the rest of the world, they are funded by private donors and foundations, with perhaps the aid of local government. However, this museum in Bir Zeit – like most other Palestinian Arab initiatives – is using Western government funds.

The major funder is called “The Welfare Association.” Despite its universal sounding name, it is dedicated solely to Palestinian Arab projects.

Its money comes from “the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, World Bank, EU, Islamic Development Bank, Arab Monetary Fund, Kuwait Fund, AGFUND, Ford Foundation, and the governments of Austria, Canada, France, Italy, and Switzerland, among others.”

I suppose a museum devoted to a false history is less damaging than ones that promote terror. But given that all three are devoted to the same goal – of denying Israel its right to exist – that’s a small comfort.

3) Einstein’s never given speech

Yair Rosenberg writes about Einstein’s last speech, which he was to have delivered on Yom Ha’atzmaut 1955. Einstein died 8 days too soon:

“This is the seventh anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel,” Einstein opened. “The establishment of this State was internationally approved and recognised largely for the purpose of rescuing the remnant of the Jewish people from unspeakable horrors of persecution and oppression.”

“Thus, the establishment of Israel is an event which actively engages the conscience of this generation,” he continued. “It is, therefore, a bitter paradox to find that a State which was destined to be a shelter for a martyred people is itself threatened by grave dangers to its own security. The universal conscience cannot be indifferent to such peril.”

Einstein had choice words for those who placed disproportionate blame on Israel for its tensions with its Arab neighbors. “It is anomalous that world opinion should only criticize Israel’s response to hostility and should not actively seek to bring an end to the Arab hostility which is the root cause of the tension.”