All the historical forces that exist today in the Arab-Israeli conflict are just rebirths of old forces we tend to think of as new. What is new is simply each generation’s discovery of these forces. It proves the old maxim that history does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

And so it is with Mitchell Bard’s new book, “The Arab Lobby.” You may think AIPAC is devising the Mideast policies of the US government. You might think that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, “The Israel Lobby,” accurately portrays the new state of the US-Israeli relationship whereby the Israeli tail wags the US dog; that the US State Dept. and our military bend to Israeli concerns over American self-interest; that Arabs and Arab states have become more reasonable and Palestinians are now the underdogs; and that Israel is an imperialist and even apartheid state. And finally, you might believe that it is new to say that it is in Israel’s self-interest for the USA to take a more aggressive approach to some presumed Israeli intransigence, for their own good (tough love?).

Bard makes the case that there exists an Arab Lobby, that this Lobby has existed formally since the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and informally through various Arab political formations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I. The House of Saud, for instance, is one example. More importantly, the same political forces pulling on the US government, the White House, the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Islamists, the Pentagon, and all the parallel institutions of the Israelis has not fundamentally changed over all these years. The one thing that has changed though is that the Arabs are better at lobbying in the USA and have more influence than ever. But not near enough to change their relative strength in our political arena.

One important thing that is true now and was true way back when is that the Arab Lobby does not have a popular base among the US people while the Israel Lobby does.

The Arabs do not seek to call attention to or debate Israel head on because their attempts to do so have always been failures, as Bard points out. They’ve tried this. Their heavy-handed narratives only alienate them from the American people. So they prefer to insinuate themselves in more subdued ways, such as funding and therefore biasing Middle East scholarship departments at important American universities by endowing chairs. Or influencing the placement of their insufficiently critical narratives in our grade school and high school textbooks. Or establishing their extremist Wahhabi schools and mosques in urban and suburban America.

The fact that American support for Israel has not changed since the formation of Israel in 1948 drives the Arabs just plain crazy. But it drives the Arab’s American supporters even crazier. These Americans are an important contingent of so-called Arabists who populate and dominate our own Departments of State and even the Pentagon, some Christian denominations, the old oil industry, universities and intelligentsia, media and philo-Arabists who for various reasons (up to and including hatred of Jews) think Israel’s formation was an historical tragedy. Bard thinks this combination of forces is larger and more powerful than the Israel Lobby, but less politically agile because it fundamentally has to go against American sympathy for Israel and the Jews.

Moreover, Bard says, the Arabists have been consistently wrong in their arguments against Israel and in favor of the Arabs. These historic arguments include that Israel’s formation would be a danger to the Jews, that arming Israel would lead to Israeli over-reaction and war, that Israel would go communist, that the Arab nations would break with the United States and deny us oil, etc. Still, the Arabists manage to continuously dredge up these same arguments in new forms.

From this understanding Bard then makes a new and interesting point: The Arab Lobby morphed from its nascent Jew-hatred, oil-based threats and denial of Israel’s self-determination to support for a narrative of an underdog, oppressed and repressed Palestinian nationhood. Bard makes a case that this new narrative never really accorded with the reality of Israeli-Palestinian politics. In 2002 NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported to much excitement that Saudi ruler Crown Prince Abdullah announced at a dinner to which he was invited in Riyadh that the Arabs would bury the hatchet (normalize relations) with Israel if Israel made a complete withdrawal from the disputed territories. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert famously made the requisite Israeli-side offer to negotiate on this basis, but the Saudis never responded positively to his entreaties, even changing the terms. Meanwhile, Friedman’s hechsher helped them garner much undeserved goodwill just after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

To continue, the Arabs also succeeded in turning the struggle of narratives from one of an embattled David (Israel) against the Arab Goliath to a religious war in which the Arab and Muslim diaspora could pit a Jewish/Nazi/imperialist state against Islam. Otherwise, why would Muslims in Asia care about the Palestinian problem when they have many others closer to their home? Yet none of this has empirically increased their support among the American people.

Yet the Arabs and Muslims have built many American-based Islamic and Arab organizations precisely to push the religious line: devout and peaceful Muslims against Islamophobia. These organizations get ample funding and backing from Arab sources. The Congress of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is one of these. It bills itself as a Muslim version of the NAACP. But it was founded by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, it refuses to back Israel against Hamas, and it’s leaders have been put on record in closed meetings as calling itself pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah. They have lost support from a high of 29,000 members after the 9/11 attack to around 1,700 in 2006, according to a report in the Washington Times. Meanwhile, they have been feted by high-level administration operatives and used as counsel on such things as police training against a supposed Islamophobia.

Bard details the more contemporaneous cast of characters: Christian anti-Zionists such as the Presbyterian Church, diplomatic alumni seeking careers as Arab and Muslim favorites, academics who couch the Arab and Muslim narrative in biased terms in the classrooms of our youth and in our universities.

None of these new initiatives has paid off so far in turning America against Israel. Meanwhile the Israeli narrative has grown stronger in America. But can this working relationship be undone? The Arab Lobby would like to do just that.

Come and learn more about this important work by Mitchell Bard and deepen your understanding of this subject. Mitchell Bard will make an appearance at the Boulder Jewish Community Center on Sunday, February 12 at 7:00 pm to talk about his new book, “The Arab Lobby.”

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman just revealed himself in spades. Actually, I’ve been “on” to Friedman for a long time, going back to the 1980s. Journalism is assumed to be about truth and being a watchdog on untruth, but narcissism constantly gets in the way. I think he just got so cockily resilient from criticism, he pulled the curtain in a revealing way he did not mean to trigger.

But there is a bigger issue. The “truthiness” of the NY Times itself. This is not a recent problem. The Times, which prides itself as the newspaper of record, the Old Grey Lady, the newspaper whose mast said, “all the news that’s fit to print,” the newspaper that prides itself as setting the bar for all the rest of the media, that NY Times, has always had a problem with the truth. It reported, beside knowing better, that starvation of the Ukrainians in the 1930s was much less than actual and that the little that they counted occurred without any deliberate attempt at a purposeful policy by Stalin and his administration. We’re talking here about the deaths of upwards of 7.5 million Ukrainians. The well-named Ukrainian breadbasket was fleeced by food exports out of the Ukraine under Soviet control, resulting in the starvation of this cradle of food. Yet the Times did not paint this picture, despite their castigation on this point by other news outlets. The Times’ Walter Duranty even won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, a prize the Times after the war played down because of the shame of NOT reporting the facts straight. There was a serious but failed attempt to take that Pulitzer away, and the Times did not object, nor defend Duranty. There are many instances where we can see the “truthiness” issue of the Times years after it’s own reporting.

The current problem is more immediate. Friedman castigated Israel’s PM Netanyahu for being resoundingly welcome in the US Congress because they were bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby. He’s made many “unhelpful” statements, but this latest one jumps the shark.

Worse still, when the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris revolted with a scathing critique of Friedman, the Times published an edited, toned down version meant, obviously, to blunt the growing chorus of criticism aimed at one of its star columnists. You can read David Harris’ note on the incident below.

Has the Times no shame? No, apparently not. They have also jumped the shark.

Read the dust-up below:

New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman Crossed a Line

David Harris

December 19, 2011

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, crossed a line in his recent op-ed, “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir.”

Shockingly, he wrote: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

We submitted a letter-to-the-editor to the Times the very same day.

The good news is the paper published an AJC letter, the only one about Friedman’s column, as it surprisingly turned out.

The bad news is they cut out the heart of it.

Read the rest of David Harris’ piece here, at AJC’s blog.

Although the Palestinians spread the lie to the world media that Israel committed a massacre against the Palestinian civilian population (the UN subsequently verified that no such massacre occurred), and the level of destruction was limited rather than widespread as also depicted in the media, an important and telling incident during that battle showed the difference in the mentality between the warring sides.

An IDF unit chose to do an on-the-ground house-by-house search for terrorist combatants rather than call for F-16 strikes which might kill innocent civilians as collateral damage. One should understand that Palestinian civilians often offered themselves as human shields, knowing that Israelis will avoid harming them while in pursuit of their compatriots, and that the Palestinian side booby-trapped the houses and streets with explosives. Knowing this, the IDF still decided to choose “boots on the ground” rather than air power.

A Palestinian commander during the battle, Tabaat Mardawi, told CNN from prison in Israel, that after learning the IDF was going to use troops, and not planes, “It was like hunting … like being given a prize… The Israelis knew that any soldier who went into the camp like that was going to get killed… I’ve been waiting for a moment like that for years”. [CNN.com, August 23, 2003, "Palestinian fighter describes 'hard fight' in Jenin"]

The result of this “boots on the ground” decision was the deaths of thirteen Israeli soldiers in one incident, all killed by the explosion of a booby-trapped home and the subsequent ambush by Palestinian militias in what became known as “the bathtub.”

Such decisions are not unique and the IDF soldiers are constantly and in numerous incidents called on to choose life over death. In fact, the entire Israeli operation in Jenin was deliberately slowed down just in consideration of possible civilian casualties.

Why? And does the answer matter?

The answer demonstrates the difference in mentality between the warring sides. The Palestinian side makes it honorable to lie, to encourage death, to slaughter its enemies. Let me be clear, I am not saying this is the mentality of the Palestinian population; I am saying this is the attitude of the Palestinian militants and a large segment of the Palestinian population. This is different with the Israelis. Armies kill and wars are brutal, but the difference in attitudes is none the less telling and distinctive.

It is not that Israeli soldiers harbor no hate or desire to kill, it is that they are educated differently in handling their response and the rules under which they can engage Palestinians.

And one can see this by observing the difference in their training from the primary, secondary and university educational institutions in distinction to the culture of radical Islamism. All that even before we get to that which comes from soldiering.

But soldiering, the training of a soldier, is telling too.

For that reason four local, pro-Israel organizations (Stand By Israel, Stand With Us, Americans Against Terrorism and Action Israel) are sponsoring a visit to the Denver-Boulder area of Sergeant (Res.) Nadav Weinberg, who served in the Special Forces Counter-Terrorism Unit of the IDF.  Having recently finished his service in the IDF, Weinberg is touring outside Israel and addressing the whole issue by describing the training of the Israeli soldier in his and her ethical duties.

The title of his talk is,“Ethics and Israel: Gilad Shalit and the Israel Defense Forces.” Weinberg will be speaking on successive days in Boulder on November 30th and at Colorado Christian University on December 1st . The Boulder event begins at 7:00 pm at the CU Boulder  Chabad House, 909 14th St.; CCU talk begins at 6:30 pm at the CCU School of Music, 9200 West Ellsworth Ave., Lakewood.

IDF Sergeant (Res.) Nadav Weinberg  will speak on “Ethics and Israel: Gilad Shalit and the Israel Defense Forces” in Boulder on November 30 and in Lakewood on December 1.

Weinberg was born in Israel, moved to the United States as a child, and joined the Israel Defense Forces after his graduation from Case Western Reserve University in 2008. He was trained in the Orev Special Forces in the Nachal Brigade. His unit’s primary job was to prevent terrorist attacks throughout Israel.

While sitting in an ethics seminar during Special Forces training, he realized that the information he was learning was not common knowledge. Since that moment, Weinberg has been determined to share what he has learned with people across the U.S., especially students.

Weinberg now travels to college campuses, as well as other destinations, to educate people about the ethical codes of the Israel Defense Forces through interactive scenarios, video clips and most importantly, sharing the facts.

Weinberg will speak at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, November 30, at CU Chabad, located at 909 14th Street in Boulder, and at 6:30 pm on Thursday, December 1, at the School of Music at Colorado Christian University, located at 9200 West Ellsworth Avenue in Lakewood. His talks will explain the high ethical standards practiced by the IDF and will also explore the ethics of the captors of recently returned IDF soldier Gilad Shalit and of the Israeli government in bringing about Shalit’s release.

An article about Weinberg’s appearances on college campuses across the United States recently appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

Weinberg’s appearances in the Boulder-Denver area are sponsored by Stand By Israel, in conjunction with Action Israel, Americans Against Terrorism, and Stand With Us. CU Chabad is co-sponsoring the Boulder appearance.

Both events are open to the public at no charge. For more information: mail@standbyisrael.com

The Stockholm Syndrome defines an emotional attachment hostages many times take to their captors, even defending them after the ordeal (think of a young Patty Hearst committing bank robbery as a voluntary member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, this after being captured by them from the midst of her wealthy life).

Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School, used this idea in his 2005 book, “The Oslo Syndrome,” to describe the phenomenon of Jewish leaders and intellectuals irrationally subscribing to policies which are clearly, in his eyes, antithetical to their own well-being, perhaps even their lives. Sometimes the Jewish reaction to the hatred from the world toward Israel is to ask the question: what did we do or are we doing wrong that explains why Jews are under attack?

Why would a Jew be more prejudicial to his or her own ethnicity than other ethnic groups who are poised to kill them? This problem is not the rational behavior of someone who is merely confused about history as it applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; what I refer to here is some psychological predisposition to accept a one-sided narrative even if that acceptance means emotional or physical harm. It is therefore a call to understand:

1. That those who oppose you may not be coming to you rationally in the first place (an older Holocaust Survivor was on the recent Turkish inspired Flotilla which included the Mavi Marmara). There are Jews who want to believe those who hate them and want to kill them.

2. An explanation of why this irrational behavior might be the case; what is the dynamic by which this phenomenon, the Oslo Syndrome, occurs? Are they, for instance, trying to find solace from a personal angst about hatred directed at them by anti-Semites?

Just asking the question is tricky; even more so is any answer.

This is a good time of the year, during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to study and contemplate the question of, in the reverse of sending the sacrificial goat to the wilderness with our sins, Jews becoming the sacrificial goat instead, accepting the sins of the Palestinians and the Arabs as their sins. Do some Jews become moral relativists to justify behavior they think absolves them of being Jewish?

Apparently, the Palestinian delegation hopes, in that case, to bypass the Security Council and seek a stepped-up recognition as a non-voting member state of the United Nations with a vote of approval in the General Assembly. This would give them some advantages in securing membership to various committees from which they could seek to isolate, for instance, Israeli universities as they try to cooperate with their world-wide counterparts. However, more importantly, they would be able to bring cases before the International Criminal Court where they could continuously seek to prosecute individual Israelis for alleged War Crimes. But, it would also create a potential two-edged sword whereby the Palestinians could also face the ICC for terrorism-related activity.

In point of fact, the current Palestinian Authority Government and its economic, military and administrative apparatus exist only because of the Oslo Accords’ mandated principle of “land for peace,” a principle in favor of two separate states through Palestinian disarming and negotiations with Israel. Israel, by the Accords, recognizes the PA, and gives them land to establish the makings of a state. The Palestinians disarm their armies and seek only direct negotiation with Israel. Seeking a unilateral declaration of a state, and the military exercise on behalf of the creation of this state, is strictly an abrogation by the Palestinian Government of the Oslo Accords.

The 1948 Cease-fire lines, also called the Green Line, the 1967 cease-fire lines, Jerusalem, and all the territory of Gaza and the West Bank are temporary lines until set by negotiation between the parties to the Accords. Israeli settlements are not illegal and neither is Palestinian settlement of the land. Israel has the right to draw the eventual border lines in a way that will ensure its security, a right by mandates stemming from 1967 UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and the follow-on Resolution 338.

Today, the Palestinians say that Israel is not negotiating in good faith and they therefore must break the impasse by seeking to create their state by bypassing Israel. Is this true? No, not true. In fact, I would accuse the Palestinians and the Arabs of bad faith negotiation themselves. But how does one untangle this web of charge and counter-charge? Read the history; but better yet for now, watch this video narrated by past Israeli Ambassador to the United States and current Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Danny Ayalon:

The first is an article by Stanford Economics Professor and former George H. W. Bush advisor Michael J. Boskin in the Wall Street Journal and the second is by Harvard Economics Professor Robert Barro, the third-highest-ranked economist in the world and a probable shoe-in for an eventual Nobel Prize in Economics.

Boskin issues a report card on Obama’s Presidency with regard to the macro-economy, giving us a detailed analysis of its context and comparables with Bush 43 and President Clinton. He laid out the negatives, and did not have any positives. You should read it directly. Some could argue that the new healthcare law is a positive, but that still remains to be seen, and is not yet a positive. We can, in that case, allude to the 2000 or so waivers issued to businesses such as McDonalds seeking to avoid instituting its provisions as a harbinger of the potential negatives. Nonetheless, Boskin does an adequate job in a short essay to put Obama’s past economic policies into a current perspective.

Then there is Barro’s article in the New York Times that puts forth a jobs plan of his own making. Barro calls for some radical ideas that are doable. Institute a VAT (Value Added Tax) that is widely used in Europe and Canada, a consumption tax, that is far more easy to track and collect. At the same time, cut corporate taxes to zero and do away with inheritance taxes. Also, implement two provisions of the Bowles-Simpson plan that would change entitlements under Social Security and Medicare.

Now, let me be clear. I am NOT in favor of any of this plan, and would oppose it. But that is not the point I am trying to make.

The point I am trying to make with the Barro plan is that President Obama could have chosen to put forth other plans than the one he did, which was one more akin to what he has already chosen to do in the first 2.5 plus years of his Presidency. Boskin showed that Obama’s Keynesian policies did not do as projected. Barro is a free-market, non-Keynesian economist and so is Boskin, and they both surely were negative on Obama’s policy prescriptions, but they may instead have both been able to support the Barro plan. The Barro plan is negative to me on the Right, and negative to the Left as well. I would still not support it, but that is not the point. It could pass without me, but it could possibly pass.

And yet Obama chose to go it alone and push a bill that does not have bi-partisan support. Why? Well, interesting question that.

Obama’s chances of winning re-election are dismal (its the economy, stupid) and I think his policy speech is a re-election strategy. He hopes to gin up the Left into a frenzy of class-warfare politics that trades on the plusses of his 2008 campaign victory: that a strong Left-wing constituency will be energized to actively campaign for him. He hopes to paint the Republican Party as completely truculent. This will not work. Clinton simply moved to the center where most of the American public resides, but Obama cannot or will not do that.

Too bad for the unemployed.

You can read the articles in the two publications through the links below:

Boskin: The Obama Presidency By the Numbers

Barro: How To Save the Economy

Yet, both the PA and the Iranian governments spread a lie based on the false claim that Israel will not negotiate sincerely in the creation of a Palestinian state. The formula for the 1993 Oslo Accords was and is “land for peace.” Former Palestinian leader and President Yasir Arafat pledged non-violence in exchange for Israel’s entry into negotiations and recognition of the Palestinian Authority government, but the Palestinian side has never committed to a non-violence that would give the Israelis confidence that a tangible hand-over of land is worth an intangible promise of peace. Instead, the Palestinians having been given control of land on the West Bank and in Gaza by Israel, have used it as a launching pad for terror and for a world-wide campaign to obfuscate the history of the conflict. A true telling of that history is that the Palestinian side has demonstrated wholly bad-faith negotiations.

This is not a case of he said, she said.

Although the conflict is on-going, it is the web of lies by the Palestinian side that tells the tale, like in the story of King Solomon’s test of the mother’s love over his proposal to split a contested baby. Which side has upheld its obligations and which has not? Do the web of lies, deceit and obfuscation in itself help us decide which side has committed bad-faith negotiations, and which has not? I would say yes and an analysis would show that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians and the Arabs the victimizers.

The Ahmadinejad headline is the tell-tale sign of the Palestinian plea to the UN to circumvent Israel and attempt to draw the noose around the Israeli neck. This is the opposite of peace; it is the precursor to war.

No Israeli government can enter into a peace agreement while under such duress. Furthermore, any left-wing or peace movement that insists on this will only bring us to the brink of more war and no peace. The Israelis cannot be circumvented in this process and forced to a peace agreement by attempts to isolate her. Yet that idea of isolating Israel is what one reads in the left-wing press and blogs; indeed, even in the mainstream press. David Landau, editor of Israel’s own newspaper of record, Haaretz, once invited the USA to come and “rape” Israel, meaning to force her into submission to a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

The world must not buy into the Palestinian gambit, but the world is likely to do so. The Jews are simply more expendable. We saw this movie before in the story of the Holocaust. When will the world ever learn?

See the entire TIP article here.