We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
Iraqi Insurgents Boast They’re Building an Arab Super-State: Lee Smith, Tablet, June 12, 2013— In seizing Mosul, Tikrit and other northern Iraqi cities over the last 48 hours, the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham has moved closer to what some Middle East experts believe is the organization’s end goal—to create an emirate, an Islamic rump-state, encompassing large parts of Iraq and Syria.
Pragmatism, Obama and the Bergdahl Swap: Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2014— US President Barack Obama is an artist of political propaganda.
Free Bowe Bergdahl, Then Try Him: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, June 5, 2014— What is it with Susan Rice and the Sunday morning talk shows?
Jerusalem’s ‘One-Shekel’ Mayor is Adamant About One Thing: The City Must Never Be Divided: Joseph Brean, National Post, June 8, 2014 — Nir Barkat, the software entrepreneur in his second term as mayor of Jerusalem, is known as a “one-shekel mayor” because he takes a nominal salary, pays his own expenses, and makes a point of describing his constituents as “customers.”
Maliki’s Iraq Disaster: David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 12, 2014
Iraq is on the Brink, But the U.S. is Not to Blame: Fred Kaplan, National Post, June 13, 2014
P.O.W. Deal Gives Qatar a Victory, and a New Test: Rod Nordland & Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, June 6, 2013
The Other Captive Americans–Will Obama Trade For Them?: William McGurn, New York Post, June 13, 2014
50th Anniversary of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Reunites Tevye’s Many Daughters: Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post, June 13, 2014
IRAQI INSURGENTS BOAST THEY’RE
Lee Smith
Tablet, June 12, 2014
In seizing Mosul, Tikrit and other northern Iraqi cities over the last 48 hours, the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham has moved closer to what some Middle East experts believe is the organization’s end goal—to create an emirate, an Islamic rump-state, encompassing large parts of Iraq and Syria. This, some fear, is a symptom of the region-wide sectarian war, from Beirut to Baghdad, threatening to jeopardize the Arab state system and crash the borders imposed by the British and French with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, ISIS is boasting as much. Its propaganda outlets claim the organization is in the process of restoring the caliphate, and erasing the lines secretly drawn by French diplomat François George-Picot and his British counterpart Mark Sykes before the end of World War I.
Still, it’s worth putting ISIS’s claims, and the predictions of Middle East experts, in context. The reality is that virtually every Arab political movement of the last century (or at least since London and Paris agreed on the Sykes-Picot lines in 1916) has attempted to eliminate the boundaries drawn by the Great Powers. Indeed, Arab nationalism itself is nothing more than the conviction that the Arabs constitute one great historical nation, divided only by a series of imperial overlords, from the Mongols through the Ottomans up to the Western powers, most recently the United States and Israel. The destiny of the Arabs then is to reunite and thereby overcome the divisions, and borders, forced on them by foreigners.
Accordingly, various political movements have manipulated the conceit of Arab unity largely for the purpose of empowering themselves at the expense of rivals. Consider, for instance, Gamal abdel-Nasser, the Arab nationalist hero par excellence. For a brief period, the Egyptian president “erased” Sykes-Picot when he joined his country to Syria to create the United Arab Republic. This combined entity was a formidable affair—until it crashed after only three years on the rocks of Egyptian-Syrian enmity, and Damascus withdrew from the portmanteau state. Nasser promoted himself as a champion of Arab nationalism for no other reason than to enflame the passions of the Arab masses across the region and direct them against his Arab rivals, especially the conservative, or pro-U.S. states, like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, who, said Nasser, betrayed the Arab cause. In other words, Nasser used pan-Arabism to promote his interests and those of Egypt in particular, not of the Arabs as a whole.
Baathism, a rival of Nasserism, was a secular doctrine also arguing for the oneness of the Arabs. And yet Baathism’s two major parties in Damascus and Baghdad were perpetually at each other’s throats, from the 1960s up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, as each sought to keep the other off balance. That is, while Baathism had promised to erase the colonial borders of Sykes-Picot, both the Syrian and Iraqi branches were willing to die and kill each other for the interests of regimes ruling states whose lines were drawn by foreigners.
The same fractiousness is equally true for another Arab nationalist doctrine, albeit one with a religious coloring—Islamism. Long before ISIS planted its flag to claim a caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was there first, promising its adherents a political order that would unite Arabs from North Africa to the Persian Gulf under the banner of the prophet of Islam. Nonetheless, Muslim Brotherhood chapters around the region, and even sometimes within states, are in constant competition with each other. As for the likelihood of Islamists erasing Sykes-Picot, Egypt’s former president, the now-imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi, wasn’t even able to hold on to power in Cairo, never mind build a caliphate.
In short, despite all the pan-Arab ideologies, both secular and religious, that have promised to do away with the borders imposed by the Western powers and build a new pan-Arab super state, or an Islamic caliphate, nationalism is still a powerful force in the Arabic-speaking Middle East—as is Sykes-Picot. Consider, for instance, the standard-bearers of the region’s most famous national movement: the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat didn’t settle for cantons or a rump-state, and neither will Mahmoud Abbas—they want the entirety of at least that part of Mandate Palestine stretching from the West Bank of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, now called Israel. In 1970, King Hussein of Jordan vanquished the PLO when Arafat made a play for the eastern half of Mandate Palestine, what used to be called Transjordan, as well.
The Sykes-Picot borders are still live issues—in part because they are based on living historical traditions, as evidenced by ISIS’s name. Bilad al-Sham, or “country of the north,” is how many Arabs refer to what is now called Syria, which with its capital in Damascus was home to the Umayyad empire (661-750 CE). The Iraqi capital, Baghdad, was the home of the dynasty that followed the Umayyad caliphs, the Abassids (750-1258). The Sykes-Picot lines were drawn in the full knowledge that Arab unity was a myth—a dangerous myth that left unchecked would inspire regional actors to ambitious feats of conquest. Instead, boxed in by borders, Arab despots from Nasser to Syria’s Assad regime had to settle for sabotage and subterfuge. Arab efforts to redraw Sykes-Picot, like Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, have been rebuffed by the Western powers. Likewise, it’s those same Western states that are responsible for redrawing the only real new borders in the region. For instance, by establishing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq, the United States effectively drew the lines for what today has become an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Moreover, consider that over the last sixty-plus years no regional state has redrawn its own borders, and those of its neighbors, more than Israel, the country that Arab nationalists call an outpost of Western imperialism…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
PRAGMATISM, OBAMA AND THE BERGDAHL SWAP
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2014
US President Barack Obama is an artist of political propaganda. Both his greatest admirers and his most vociferous opponents agree that his ability to manipulate public opinion has no peer in American politics today. So how can we explain the fiasco that is his decision not only to swap five senior Taliban terror masters for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, but to take ownership over the decision by presenting it to the American people in a ceremony with Bergdahl’s parents at the White House Rose Garden? Clearly Obama overreached. He misread the public’s disposition.
This much is made clear by the immediate criticism his actions received from the liberal media. It wasn’t just Fox News and National Review that said Obama broke the law when he failed to notify Congress of the swap 30 days prior to its implementation. It was CNN and NBC News. MSNBC commentators criticized the swap. And CNN interviewed Bergdahl’s platoon mates who to a man accused him of desertion, with many alleging as well that he collaborated with the enemy. It was CNN that gave the names of the six American soldiers who died trying to rescue Bergdahl from the Taliban. What was it about the Bergdahl trade tipped the scales? Why is this decision different from Obama’s other foreign policy decisions? For instance, why is the public outraged now when it wasn’t outraged in the aftermath of the jihadist assault on US installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in which US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered? Politically, Obama emerged unscathed from failures in every area he has engaged. From Iraq to Iran to Syria to Libya to Russia and beyond, he has never experienced the sort of across the board condemnation he is now suffering. His political allies and media supporters always rallied to his side. They always explained away his failures.
So what explains the outcry? Why are people like Senator Dianne Feinstein, who have been supportive of Obama’s nuclear appeasement of Iran, up in arms over the Bergdahl swap? There are three aspects of the Bergdahl deal that distinguish it from the rest of Obama’s foreign policy blunders. First, the Bergdahl deal was conducted in an unlawful manner and the White House readily acknowledged that it knowingly broke the law by not informing Congress 30 days in advance of the swap. This brazen lawbreaking angered Obama’s loyal allies in Congress who, like Feinstein, were insulted by his behavior. Second, Obama initiated the story and made himself the sole owner of the swap. Obama didn’t have to make the Bargdahl swap a story about his foreign policy. He chose to. As commentators have argued, if Obama had simply ordered the Defense Department to issue a press release announcing the swap the story probably wouldn’t have caused more than the normal amount of controversy. And whereas Benghazi was a story about jihadists attacking, and Obama was pilloried – and defended – for his response to an act of aggression initiated by US enemies, Obama presented the Bergdahl swap as his brainchild. So it is impossible to blame anyone else for this move, or wish it away.
As the administration saw it, the public would rally around the leader over this feel-good story. Obama obviously believed that the Bergdahl trade would help him to surmount his opponents’ criticism over the Veterans’ Administration scandal and other issues. And this is where his failure to understand the disposition of the American people comes into play. The third aspect of the swap that distinguishes it from his other foreign policy failures is that by organizing the ceremony at the Rose Garden, and making it a story about himself, Obama denied his supporters the tools they have used in every other instance to explain away his failures and justify his counterproductive decisions. Obama sailed into office by presenting himself as a non-ideological pragmatist. Obama recognized that the public was tired of foreign policies based on ideology. George W. Bush lost public support for the war in Iraq, and for his foreign policy goal of bringing freedom to the Islamic world more generally, when his ideologically charged rhetoric of American exceptionalism stopped matching the situation on the ground.
A year after Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the sight of US military contractors being lynched in Fallujah soured the public on American exceptionalism. In Obama, they hoped that they found the antidote to Bush – a man who promised to replace ideology with hard-nosed pragmatism. In the event, Obama turned out to be even more driven by ideology than Bush was. Obama is the anti-Bush not because he matches Bush’s ideology with pragmatism. He is the anti-Bush because he matches Bush’s grand foreign policy based on American exceptionalism with his own grand foreign policy based on American moral deficiency. He made this clear most recently at his commencement address at West Point last month where he stipulated that “American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. We can’t exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everybody else… .”
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
FREE BOWE BERGDAHL, THEN TRY HIM
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, June 5, 2014
What is it with Susan Rice and the Sunday morning talk shows? This time she said Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had served in Afghanistan “with honor and distinction” — the biggest whopper since she insisted the Benghazi attack was caused by a video. There is strong eyewitness evidence that Bergdahl deserted his unit and that the search for him endangered his fellow soldiers. If he had served with honor and distinction, there would be no national uproar over his ransom and some of the widely aired objections to the deal would be as muted as they are flimsy. For example:
1. America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Nonsense. Of course we do. Everyone does, while pretending not to. The Israelis, by necessity the toughest of all anti-terror fighters, in 2011 gave up 1,027 prisoners, some with blood on their hands, for one captured staff sergeant. 2. The administration did not give Congress 30-day notice as required by law. Of all the jurisdictional disputes between president and Congress, the president stands on the firmest ground as commander in chief. And commanders have the power to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Moreover, from where did this sudden assertion of congressional prerogative spring? After five years of supine acquiescence to President Obama’s multiple usurpations, Congress suddenly becomes exercised over a war power — where its claim is weakest. Congress does nothing in the face of 23 executive alterations of the president’s own Affordable Care Act. It does nothing when Obama essentially enacts by executive order the Dream Act, which Congress had refused to enact. It does nothing when the Justice Department unilaterally rewrites drug laws. And now it rises indignantly on its hind legs because it didn’t get 30 days’ notice of a prisoner swap?
3. The Taliban release endangers national security. Indeed it does. The five released detainees are unrepentant, militant and dangerous. They’re likely to go back into the field and resume their war against local and foreign infidels, especially us. The administration pretense that we and the Qataris will monitor them is a joke. They can start planning against us tonight. And if they decide to leave Qatar tomorrow, who’s going to stop them? The administration might have tried honesty here and said: Yes, we gave away five important combatants. But that’s what you do to redeem hostages. In such exchanges, the West always gives more than it gets for the simple reason that we value individual human life more than do the barbarians with whom we deal. No shame here, merely a lamentable reality. So why does the Bergdahl deal rankle? Because of how he became captive in the first place. That’s the real issue. He appears to have deserted, perhaps even defected. The distinction is important. If he’s a defector — joined the enemy to fight against his country — then he deserves no freeing. Indeed, he deserves killing, the way we kill other enemies in the field, the way we killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American who had openly joined al-Qaeda. A U.S. passport does not entitle a traitor to any special protection. (Caveat: If a POW is turned, Stockholm-syndrome-like, after falling captive, these condemnatory considerations don’t apply.)
Assume, however — and we will find out soon enough — that Bergdahl was not a defector. Simply wanted out — a deserter who walked or wandered away from his duty and his comrades for reasons as yet unknown. Do you bargain for a deserter? Two imperatives should guide the answer. Bergdahl remains a member of the U.S. military and therefore is (a) subject to military justice and (b) subject to the soldiers’ creed that we don’t leave anyone behind. What to do? Free him, then try him. Make the swap and then, if the evidence is as strong as it now seems, court-martial him for desertion…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
JERUSALEM’S ‘ONE-SHEKEL’ MAYOR IS ADAMANT ABOUT ONE
THING: THE CITY MUST NEVER BE DIVIDED
Joseph Brean
National Post, June 8, 2014
Nir Barkat, the software entrepreneur in his second term as mayor of Jerusalem, is known as a “one-shekel mayor” because he takes a nominal salary, pays his own expenses, and makes a point of describing his constituents as “customers.” His emphasis on fiscal prudence, in a city whose economy has struggled to retain its most skilled workers, is partly a symbolic exercise in political branding. But it also reflects his broader vision of the political life of a city that is holy to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, in which religious tension abounds, and his greatest challengers have come from the large, insular Orthodox community. In such a climate, being a secular mayor offers a chance to transcend those divisions.
In an interview Sunday, Mr. Barkat, 54, barely mentioned religion. He said Jerusalem is “vibrant” and “bullish,” as evidenced by the number of cranes in the air, and he is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy based on the twin pillars of cultural tourism and health sciences. There is momentum, he said, with double digit growth in the municipal budget, but “relative to our potential, it’s still tiny.”
“Countries are falling apart around us,” he said. “Our economy’s growing, our crime rate is down on the floor, we must be doing something right.” His firm position that Jerusalem must never be divided, however, made his city seem a microcosm of the wider Mideast conflict, following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and a unilateral push for Palestinian statehood in which the question of Jerusalem as a capital city for both sides looms large.
Though it is often referred to as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital has not been universally recognized, with many countries choosing to do as Canada and the United States have done, and locate their embassies in the financial centre of Tel Aviv, while generally avoiding firm declarations on the topic. A key pillar of the long-sought “two state solution” is a new Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Proposals to bridge this gulf have included partition of the city, or the reclassification of Jerusalem as an international city.
Mr. Barkat rejects both, and takes another view. “It’s a simple answer,” he said. “Jerusalem will only remain the undivided, united capital of the Jewish people. If the Palestinians would like to open an embassy, side by side to the American embassy, then it should come, and the Canadian embassy should come to Jerusalem. They are welcome to do that.” In response to the observation that countries open embassies in foreign cities, not in their own capital, he said: “Right. Look, both ideologically and practically, there’s no other solution.”
“Ideologically, 3,000 years ago, when the people of Israel came back to the land of Israel, the land was divided into tribes, except one city, Jerusalem. The philosophy of managing it was it was open for all, and everyone that came to the gates of the city felt a feeling of belonging. You’re talking about the city that actually created the infrastructure of modern democracy the way we know it today. People that came into the gates of the city were different, but treated equally. One governance, all equal, Jews and non-Jews alike.”
“On the practical side, you cannot show me one example of a city that was split that ever functioned,” he said. “So why go there in the first place? All these theoretical models never fly, especially not on a city like Jerusalem that was never divided.” Mr. Barkat is in Toronto to thank Canadian donors to Canada House, a community centre developed by the Jerusalem Foundation of Canada. A gala dinner Monday night is on the theme of “youth retention,” to combat the tendency of young and vibrant Jerusalemites to migrate to Tel Aviv. “I find that the deep commitment and relationship between the people [of Canada and Israel] mustn’t be taken for granted and I’m here to develop the relationship we have,” he said. “I’m here to thank them.”
He is also keen to articulate his vision for Jerusalem’s growth, in which Canada plays a key role as both a source country of tourists and of health sciences expertise. “These two areas have gotten a lot of attention, my attention, and we can demonstrate lots of progress,” he said. “The right philosophy is to focus on your competitive advantage… It’s not forcing, it’s leveraging.” Health sciences in particular is “scaling very nicely.”
“We see a direct correlation of the vibrancy of the city and the growth of the high tech sector, specifically in health life sciences we are now about 33% of market share in the whole country,” he said, listing pharmaceutical companies that draw on the graduates of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is this link, between academia and industry, that he is focusing on developing, taking inspiration from the “business cluster” theories of Michael Porter, the Harvard economist and expert on competitiveness. He also cited his admiration for the ideas of Richard Florida, the University of Toronto urban theorist, about the “creative class,” which he said are complementary. “We’re sitting as market makers, if you like, developing the relationships, the contacts, making sure they all speak to each other. We supply the incentives,” he said. On tourism, his goal is 10-million tourists a year by 2020, which is more than double current levels.
He also offered praise for the “outspoken, honest and straightforward” approach taken by the Canadian government to questions about Israel in the global context, and offered this ideal — of putting values before politics — as a point of comparison between Canada and Russia. “You can criticize the Russian government as much as you want, but they know a few things about relationships, if you look at what they do with their allies,” he said. “Alignment and strategy is one of the most important things you have in life. You cannot blink when talking about the relationship between strategic allies. I think that Canada has demonstrated that it knows very well how to be a strategic ally to the people of Israel, to the Israeli government.”
CIJR Wishes all of its Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Maliki’s Iraq Disaster: David Ignatius, Washington Post, June 12, 2014 —The stunning gains this week by Iraq’s Sunni insurgents carry a crucial political message: Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister of Iraq, is a polarizing sectarian politician who has lost the confidence of his army and nation.
Iraq is on the Brink, But the U.S. is Not to Blame: Fred Kaplan, National Post, June 13, 2014 —The collapse of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, has little to do with the withdrawal of American troops and everything to do with the political failure of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
P.O.W. Deal Gives Qatar a Victory, and a New Test: Rod Nordland & Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, June 6, 2013—The five hardened Taliban militants were quickly whisked in a fleet of cars to the shoulder of a highway on the outskirts of the capital just as they arrived.
The Other Captive Americans–Will Obama Trade For Them?: William McGurn, New York Post, June 13, 2014—When President Obama delivered the commencement at West Point, he sounded less a commander-in-chief addressing brand-new Army officers than a local college professor speaking to a chapter of the Elks.
50th Anniversary of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Reunites Tevye’s Many Daughters: Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post, June 13, 2014—When “Fiddler on the Roof” first opened on Broadway 50 years ago, “we all thought it was going to close after the Jews had seen it,’’ said Joanna Merlin, who originated the role of Tevye the milkman’s oldest daughter, Tzeitel. “We thought it was a show for Jews.”
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