Fear-mongering is largely the forte of the fringes. When it infects the mainstream, however, we ought to get seriously worried.

This denotes a successful scare-job by forces who, in the words of America’s immortal satirist H. L. Mencken, aim “to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

There’s therefore more than ample cause for concern when Ehud Barak conjures up tsunami images to warn us that we’re about to be inundated if we don’t heed him. It’s even more disconcerting that he infects others, who then wail, panic-stricken, about the imperative to stem the tide with yet more conciliatory concessions.

This doesn’t augur well. Appeasement never solves problems. It doesn’t even facelift tarnished reputations. It inevitably makes bad situations immeasurably worse.

To be sure, what we may face in the UN come September will be unpleasant. No joy will be instilled in our hearts when the General Assembly’s automatic Israel-bashing majority votes in favor of Palestinian statehood within the 1967 lines – in flagrant disregard of what led up to 1967 and what later followed.

Yet we needn’t quake and shiver in our sandals. We have been through worse. Continue reading →

Just try to imagine what would have happened had Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stood before some Jewish forum and exclaimed that “from now on we won’t allow the presence of one Arab in our independent Israel with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The cacophony of condemnation from abroad, we can safely assume, would instantly surge into hysterical pandemonium. Livid politicos, their press and the public opinion they mold would seethe and fume as if nothing more racist were utterable. Inside Israel, the righteous ruckus would be no less frenzied and deafening.

But we can heave a sigh of relief. Luckily these words could never conceivably cross Netanyahu’s lips. This unkind sentiment, however, isn’t unfamiliar in our neighborhood. The Palestinian Authority’s head honcho and self-styled moderate keeps serially mouthing it – though in reverse.

Addressing a recent emergency session of Arab League foreign ministers in Doha, Qatar, Mahmoud Abbas unabashedly declared that “when an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is established, we won’t allow the presence of one Israeli in it.” Continue reading →

The remarkable ease with which the world hails Palestinian figurehead Mahmoud Abbas as a “man of peace” beggars the imagination. This has become so axiomatic that even Israel’s most forthright headliners hesitate to depart from the bon ton, lest they be judged as “anti-peace.” And so falsehoods become entrenched as self-evident truths.

Elements of this travesty are paradoxically consistent. After all, Abbas (Abu Mazen) is nothing if not a consummate counterfeiter, who honed his craft at Moscow’s Communist-era Russian University for Friendship between People (a.k.a. the People’s Friendship University of Russia, also a.k.a. the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University).

As befits Friendship U’s academic ambiance, Abbas specialized in revising history, an endeavor which in 1982 ripened into a PhD dissertation that both denied the Holocaust and yet blamed Zionists for it. Two years later, Dr. Abbas further expanded and embellished his “research.” He never apologized nor retracted a single nuance of his learned treatise. Nonetheless, political correctness stringently prohibits discussion thereof.

The emboldened manufacture of lies is graciously overlooked because it’s too troubling to debunk cock-and-bull chronicles and expose the faithful followers of fanciful fabrications as fools. Harping on misrepresentation is impolite, uncool and so yesterday. Best leave the sham undisturbed or – better yet – enshrine it. Continue reading →

To tell the truth, Barack Obama’s second Mideast pontification sounded better than his first – the one he delivered in Cairo soon after assuming office. His waxing ecstatic about burgeoning democracy in the Arab world appeared preferable to his bowing before sleazy Arab potentates and pretending that Muslim despots should be weighed on the same scales of pluralist evenhandedness as Western democrats.

Prima facie, more than the Arab/Muslim world had changed, Obama seemed to have substantively backtracked from entrenched moral relativism. Remember, early in his presidency he opted to coolly ignore the popular uprising in Iran and treat the Ayatollahs’ rigged election as the bona fide verdict of the masses.

Still, in a world where the three-word slogan and five-second sound bite prevail, it’s politically correct to forgive that lapse. It’s bon ton to forget that Obama’s sweet palaver sugarcoats the bitterest poison-pill. It’s uncool to mention that should Israel refuse to swallow what Obama prescribes, it’d be accused of upsetting the regional/international equilibrium.

For Obama groupies, Israeli democracy is anyhow not preferable to authorized Palestinian thuggery. It doesn’t matter that Israelis never sent suicide-bombers to Arab streets nor incited Jewish masses to annihilate Muslims. Continue reading →

Another Nakba Day has come and gone with its not-unexpected bloody consequences. The Nakba must be the single most successful revanchist propaganda ploy ever – one which dementedly ultra-tolerant Israel has allowed to gain momentum and become a fixed feature of our surreal existence.

Never has a revanchist cause been marketed as effectively. It wasn’t so even in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 when France lost Alsace-Lorraine and seethed with patriotic retributionist ardor to reverse its wartime losses. This furious groundswell was then dubbed revanchism (from revanche, French for revenge).

Revanchism is inextricably tied to irredentism – the often unsavory nationalist agitation whereby one country claims stretches of another’s territory as property belonging to it.

World War II resulted from precisely such a lethal combination of revanchism and irredentism. Hitler strove to avenge Germany’s World War I defeat and (so he claimed initially) take control of territories populated by German-speakers. He insisted that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was Germania Irredenta (unredeemed Germany) – his “last demand in Europe.”

That border region’s German inhabitants, Hitler persuaded a world all-too-eager to be duped, deserve self-determination. Germans cannot live as a minority anywhere. (Just as Arabs can’t.) Continue reading →

“Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.” – Ludwig Börne (1786-1837)

One of the wittier and more brilliant satirists ever to have come out of Germany, Börne identified with characteristic precision that indispensable preliminary step in Everyman’s quest for solutions to whatever plagues us. “If you seek wisdom,” he advised, “seek the destruction of the illusions you hold as true more than you seek new truths.”

This is counsel that should be heeded here and now by our inveterate hawkers of mega-delusion – Israel’s very own proponents of the two-state solution. Unflaggingly they peddle tattered, intrinsically disorienting delirium. Incredibly they never seem to tire of pulling the wool over their own and our eyes. They present themselves as possessors of singular insight, as harbingers of a greater truth and as wise beyond our plebeian grasp.

They won’t let go of the grand delusion that underlies their self-professed wisdom and purported truth. Their two-state delusion was certainly sweet – simplistically and seductively so. It claimed that all conflicts can be amicably and fairly settled by just dividing up whatever is contested. It touted idealistic goodwill and seemed compellingly rational. But it was from the start delusionary.
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By all formal criteria, Israel is an independent state, a nation among the nations, born of Herzlian aspirations for the normalcy of a people residing on its own sovereign soil, relieved of the complexes of two millennia of statelessness and incomparable sustained defamation-cum-persecution.

But alive within us is the restless anomaly of the Diaspora’s Court Jew, the one who strove to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be, to become their useful pet, to claim extraordinary influence while basking in the limelight of his people’s tormenters, seeing their point of view, currying their favor, setting himself apart from the Jewish masses and posturing as the possessor of greater wisdom.

The conceit of latter-day Court Jews extends to denying the very existence of the Court Jew syndrome and Diaspora deformities. Contemporary Court Jews, who suck up to world opinion – especially when that opinion unjustly excoriates the Jewish state – definitively prove the frustrated adage that you can take the Jew out of the Diaspora but you cannot always take the Diaspora out of the Jew.
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If a netherworld truly exists, then its most infamous denizen, one Adolf Hitler, must be rubbing his hands in glee. During his lifetime, when he preoccupied the entire world with his war, he never ceased to proclaim hysterically that his paramount aim was annihilating all Jews. Obsessively he reiterated his resolve to cause all nations to unite in recognition of inborn Jewish villainy.

To some extent he already succeeded among his contemporaries. The Allies never sincerely cared about Jews and never fought for them. They protected their own skins. Europe’s Jews were eventually liberated via the much-belated byproduct of Germany’s defeat. The enormity of the Holocaust could have been lessened, but it was nobody’s priority.
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If even chief Oslo culprit Shimon Peres carps about the international community’s double standards, then he must harbor super-gargantuan grievances.

Our president, after all, is a consummate “peacenik” and a timeless icon of political correctness. He is wined and dined and feted by the trendiest global Who’s Who and jet-setter celebs. He is considered the face of Israel which those usually not too well-disposed toward the Jewish state (to say the least) are most able to tolerate.

It’s telling when even Peres waxes indignant. There must be more than run-of-the-mill provocation to elicit uncommon anger from one otherwise prone to ingratiation rather than confrontation. Continue reading →